Despite a ban on medical studies on the last remaining tribes on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, a private lab along with some foreign universities is pushing for a new genetic study.
By Our Correspondent
Who are the Andamanese and Nicobarese? What are the genetic properties that set them apart from the populations of mainland India? Sixty-three years after Independence, these questions still remain unanswered. Now, after long, a proposal to conduct a “genetic” profiling of the indigenous people living on the Andaman and Nicobar islands by a private laboratory, along with several foreign universities and the Madurai Kamaraj University, has Indian experts on the subject alarmed.
According to the current policies of the Andaman & Nicobar administration, biomedical research, even to resolve public health issues among the tribes living on these islands, by established government research agencies like the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Department of Biotechnology, is banned. The policy is guided by recommendations of an expert committee set up by the Calcutta High Court in 2003. It mandates only essential government intervention in healthcare of the tribes.
One of the recommendations is for minimum contact with the six surviving tribes: Nicobarese, Great Andamanese, Onges, Jarawas, Sentinelese and Shompen, believed to be living for 60,000 years on these islands. With repeated policy changes affecting the surviving populations—suffering from malaria and Hepatitis B earlier unknown to them—even academic interaction with the indigenous tribes is now frowned upon.
Government experts are now debating what the benefit of new genetic research will be on the few hundred members of the indigenous tribes living on these ecologically fragile islands.
They also want to know, what is the need for such a study, especially when similar studies on disease susceptibility of genes have been conducted earlier by agencies like the Hyderabad based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Kolkata’s Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the Port Blair Center of the ICMR.
Besides identifying the genetic programming that causes the members of indigenous tribes to be especially vulnerable to infectious diseases, the past studies by government institutes have also uncovered evidence about the origin of the Andaman tribes, government experts say. However, all these studies were five to seven years old, there are no ongoing studies.
It was only ICMR that was allowed to study malaria and Hepatitis B among Jarawas in 2005-6. The last DNA study by Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Lalji Singh and others of the CCMB was also five years ago (published in Science), as was a nutrition study and the last DNA study by the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Kolkata and the Anthropological Survey of India (2003-4).
They now worry that the new, privately funded, studies are an attempt by a ‘contract research company’ to obtain administrative and ethical nod for research involving foreign institutions.
The much-needed study proposal was submitted by Xcelris Labs Ltd, Ahmedabad. This company provides research services like pharma trials, genomic material collection, manufacturing contract biological products and conducts related studies. The partners listed for the study include the Technical University of Denmark, University of Berkeley, University of Cambridge and Madurai Kamaraj University, in Tamil Nadu.
Since the 1960s no foreign scientist has been allowed to do research on these tribes, and the proposed Xcelris-Cambridge-Berkeley study will be the first such work, outside of India, if allowed. The proposal document says the project aims to answer questions of evolutionary relationship of the ‘mysterious Negritos’ living on the A&N islands to African and other similar Asian populations.
The investigators already have access to hair samples from the Duckworth collection in Cambridge University, taken out of India before 1947. However, the proposal includes plans to study blood samples from at least 50 indigenous people living on the islands.
Indian bureaucrats fear that the new study will only help export to foreign universities, fresh biological material from the few surviving members of the indigenous tribes; and help drug companies develop commercial patents. The intellectual property right for the study is likely to belong to foreign participants, they say.
So far, there is no report that the Health Ministry’s Screening Committee and the government’s Ethics Committee (the Central Ethics Committee on Human Research (CECHR) – a national Ethics Committee and referral body for the Ministry of Health) have cleared the study proposal, which has all the potential of degenerating into a ‘nationalist’ row.