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Open Source And Genetics
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?
What should be open source and free beer free is the specialized software used by many researchers for processing DNA and Protein sequence information. For instance, take the very nice software package Vector NTI. Does many things researchers want. Also costs $5000. Instead of NIH (government science funding agency) money being spent many times (once per funded lab), what they should do is earmark some money to get programmers to write for free usage software like Vector NTI. It would cut down on the redundant purchase of software by many government-funded laboratories. Don't even get me started on how much research money is being spent on Windows, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat...
Good research is best accomplished by having all access to all information, so that you don't have to re-invent the wheel or relearn the experiments.
So why do some companies reproduce research that 10 other groups/companies are doing?
1. To see if the work can actually be reproduced. Patents are notoriously unreliable for their reproduciblity in the chemical sector.
2. To learn more about the technology, to either improve it or use it for another project. By doing the experiments yourself, you get a lot of knowledge that is never written down on paper.
3. Having a completely different group of scientists working on a research project can lead to a completely different way of interpreting the results. Therefore, the conclusions and applications of the research are different. (Diversity of thought!)
4. The idiots forgot to do a literature search before starting their project. This unfortunately happens more often than it should.
It does look like at first glance that reproducing other previously done work is a waste of time. However, given the advantages of the first 3 points, it will continue to occur this way, and for the benefit of science, it probably should.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!