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Open Source And Genetics

Posted by Hemos on from the young-einstein-should-be-part-of-this dept.

UnanimousCoward writes "SFGate has an article about some researchers pushing for the open sourcing of genetic research software. Of course, the pros and cons are debated." It's the age-old debate; what follows the heart of the scientific method more? Peer review, or getting the information out as fast as possible?

5 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Open source it all! by atomicgirl · · Score: 2, Informative

    I work in genetics, and particularly with the computing aspect of it. My lab has a tight budget, and open source analysis software would be a tremendous help to us.

    Of course, we have some OSS tools already, namely EMBOSS and others, but the big hitters in the bio-computing field (VectorNTI, MacVector, DNAstar, etc) run in the $5000-10000 range per license. Right now, they are much more usable than their open sourced cousins. I'd love to see genetics software continue to be developed open source. We could give less taxpayer money to software corporations.

  2. Re:for dummies... by cbare · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, we already have these:

    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bioskills/
    and
    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/begperlbio/

    --
    -cbare
  3. Here's another site that follows this stuff by rchatterjee · · Score: 2, Informative

    bioinformatics.org

    They host a large number of these open-source bio software. Really worth a look if you're interested in the topic.

  4. Re:for dummies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    There are already plenty of "for dummies" books on the subject:

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D1568843 84 4/107-1368491-7993314

    For a summary, look at:
    http://www.indiaparenting.com/articles/data/art0 5_ 001.shtml

  5. Re:MMM Open Source BioTerrorism.. yummy! by hive42 · · Score: 2, Informative

    releasing genetic code into the public domin won't help bioterrorists, just knowing what the sequence of a piece of dna doesn't help a person know what it does or how that code can be used to alter other organisms pathogenic or otherwise the majority of academic genetics is already open source just look at http://www.embl.org, http://www.ensembl.org, http://www.ebi.ac.uk and this is software and dna sequences, computer code and the genetic code annot be equated we by no means understand teh gentic code well enough yet for that sort of thing to be possible and certainly is unlikely that we will in the near future