To bioprospect is to search living things in nature — plants, animals, bacteria, fungi — hoping to find something useful, especially a new medicine. It is a verb: a team can bioprospect in a rainforest or in ocean mud. Scientists take samples and test them in a lab. The word is formal and scientific; you will meet it in news about drugs and nature, not in daily chat. The idea is old in spirit — people have always looked at plants for medicine — but the modern word is about organised science, samples, and labs. Though actually, the line between bioprospecting and biopiracy is a fight about fairness: same search, different judgment, depending on whether local people were asked and paid. Do not mix the verb up with prospecting for gold, though the picture is the same — looking in the land for something valuable. Here the “gold” is a living thing that might become a drug.

生物探勘（當動詞：去自然界找可能做成藥的生物）