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Scientists No Longer Sharing Information?
chill writes: "A little while back there was an item here on Slashdot about the debate over public funded research and whether or not it should be required to be "open". Well, here is some ammunition to one side of the debate. It seem there is an article in the Chicago Tribune about the increasing unwillingness of genetic researchers to share supporting information with colleagues. The study is from the Journal of the American Medical Association for those who want more than the second-hand summary of the Trib."
Your compairison to patenting elements doesn't apply here because you can't patent a gene. You can only patent the use or application of that gene for a specific purpose.
Yes indeed, your facts are wrong. The Chinese scientist, Wen Ho Lee, worked at Los Alamos and did not STEAL the information as he had a right to access it. He was found not guilty of espionage, and the only thing that he was found to have done wrong was mis handle classified material.
I'm not sure where you heard about Clinton administration's sale of layouts for modernized weaponry and aircraft, but I'd like to see the source. As far as I know, the Chinese military technology is predominantly Russian-based, including their nuclear ICBM's.
The future isn't what it used to be.
I have always said that Patents on genes was [sic] a bad disision [sic] ... scientists tried to patent Elements ...
... - Tribune
The logic on genes is different in a couple of respects; an individual gene is not a fundamental aspect of nature; genes are nearly infinite in number, as opposed to elements, which are finite; unlike elements, genes can be modified/designed. There are extensive and legimitate differences between a patent on a gene and a patent on an element.
I would say that patents on genes shouldn't be impossible, they should just be more difficult to get and more limited in scope. At the moment, I have considerable hearsay (that's the wrong term) evidence that patents on genes are stiffling innovation.
Before I start, I am a Structural Biologist and a Computational Biologist, I might also be called a Biochemist, Cell Biologist, Molecular Biologist, Biostatistician, Bioninformatician or Biophysicist. However, I am not a Geneticist.
The conclusion, reached by the Tribune, that profit motive is having a disastrous impact on genetics information sharing is reading too much into the article. I'd have to head into the university library to actually get a copy of the full text of the article, but most of what the article concludes is that geneticists feel worse about failure to share information than scientists in the other life sciences.
Geneticists were as likely as other life scientists to deny others' requests and to have their own requests denied. However, other life scientists were less likely to report that withholding had a negative impact on their own research as well as their field of research. - Jama article
Saying that geneticists feel worse about information sharing in their field - while certainly an interesting finding - is not sufficient to conclude that
The moneymaking potential of genetic discoveries is pushing an increasing number of scientists to withhold information about how they conducted research
Now, I will channel the spirit of Eric Cartman:
Bad Chicago Tribune! [Whack] That's my pot pie! [Whack] Gimme back my pie, you stupid paper! [Whack]
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
There's too much money to potentially be made with some genetic data and the associated research, so people try to guard it. Physicists still share a lot of their research -- witness this e-Print archive, which has a lot of preprints/reprints, mainly in physics, but they're adding other fields such as CS and math.
Their stats show about 2500 article submissions per month lately (it's been increasing pretty much linearly for the past 10.5 years, although I suspect that uploading a revised version also counts as a "submission" in that graph), and about 150,000 connections per day. It's been around for more than 10 years, and is still going strong. It's a great resource; I wish my particular field had something equivalent.
Since I work in the biotech field, I can say first hand that zaius got it completely correct. The lab I work for commonly withholds information, "until it's published". Unfortunately there is as little honor among scientists as there is among any group of people. Withholding information is the only way to garuntee getting a publication out of it.
And it's not just fame or greed that causes this either. Publications have a direct effect on getting funded, and getting funded is synonymous with keeping your job in science. With the lack of funds governments give to science, getting funding can become a major factor in holding information back for a while.
I do not agree with you for the following reasons:
Researchers spend a lot of time doing research. I spend 10 years in a small, dark lab, doing genetic research, becoming a total stranger to family and friends. Do you really think the benefit of mankind was driving me? (I like to tell this on parties, though.). It was more scientific interest and being appreciated (envied, in my wet dreams) by other scientists. Darn, I paid for it. You just contributed your 25 cents a year!.
Scientist are valued by publications and amounts of funds raised. All of these things require you to keep your information from falling into 'competitors' hands. If not, you perish. If being a scientist means you are not entitled to rewards, or being able to protect your work from the (huge and not-always-so-nice) competition then people will stay away from it. In this regard, it is completely unlike the OSS movement, where the reward is based on sharing your work with others (because there is no other way to be rewarded). Scientist who do important work, better protect it. There's a lot of people who would jump on the oppurtunity to 'use' someone elses work. It's not always sure that the inventor will be in the authorlist or acknowledgements.
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
I wasn't a molecular biologist, but I did some work on bioinformatics and the human genome back in 1991-1993. I also got to experience the entire life cycle of a scientific research institute, from before its birth to its death (the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute at FSU.
The 1980's and early 1990's were pretty good. We did a lot of good work and released all of it, gratis. Then a couple of years after the turn of the decade, everything started to go to hell, and funding dried up. This is not to mean that there was a lot of funding in the first place. Academia has always been a life of genteel poverty. When I left academia and went into industry, they started paying me at more than double the amount that I had to work myself up to for 13 years in academia. But there are satisfactions to the purity of unclassified, public research that many people in days of yore considered to make up for the lack.
All the administrators started to talk in basso profundo tones about how research in the future was going to be like Business to succeed. Of course, none of them were actually interested in doing any of the things that business did to succeed. They just wanted it to be more, sorta, kinda, you know, businesslike. So they quite predictably floundered around for a little while, and everything fell apart. There is still public research being done, but way less of it, and actual businesses who knew how to run businesses took over.
Part of the trouble is that all those clowns who say "if I pay a dime for it, I want it" aren't willing to pay any more than a dime, and you'd better believe they're going to stick their tongues straight down the cracks of any politicians who promise to drop it to a nickle or a penny. They still want it, though, because, By God It's Their Tax Pennies!
Of course, they always have a justification for that, like Look How Much I'm Paying in Taxes, or Maybe Universities Would Get More Money If They Didn't Have Football and Taught Better. None of the justifications will pay the piper.
For this same reason, several scientific journals require that researchers agree to make their materials (strains, clones, etc) available to all.
If you break that (written) promise you won't be publishing in that journal again. I wonder if any publically-funded grants have such a clause? (share or no more tax dollars for you!)
In labs I have worked in, it was considered an honor to receive such requests for the products of your research. And there was always the constant dread of being scooped by the competition...
Competition is a good thing.
I don't want to call bullshit on this one but I'm afraid I must. Sure, there are companies out there *cough* Celera *cough*who hoarded data and even used public data to advance their own research without then adding back to the public database. But to say that the public human (and mouse which is my specialty) genome project suffered because of private interference is karma whore bullshit.
...
If you remember correctly (which you apparently don't), the public and private human genome sequences were published on the exact same day, one in Science (Celera) and one in Nature (public). The data in the two sets is slightly different but essentially the same stuff. Interestingly though, the private data (to which I have some access) is almost completely undecipherable and full of restrictions on its use, whereas the public data is simple to get to, simple to understand and completely available for downstream academic use (and easily licensable for commercial use).
I do agree with you statement that many financial backers (including some who fund both public and private research) are
doing it "to make a crap load of money" but I think you ignore the fact that many of us in "public" research take advantage of the private money to advance the public interest. Yes, there are situations in which NDAs and similar documents are involved, but more often than not, the "private" money that I've been involved with in research has had no limits on publication or sharing of resources/reagents. DOD money on the other hand (I'm just getting started on a DOD funded collaboration) comes with so many strings attached that you feel like a freakin' puppet.
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
Apparently, the Celera mouse sequence had a lot of stuff missing. At this fall's International Mouse Genome Conference in Edinburgh a few people got up at the end of the Celera hack's talk about their database and asked about all the mistakes and internal inconsistencies that they'd found. His reply was..."no you didn't, our data is right, you need to re-check your data." All in all it was quite sad.
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
Most data from publicly funded projects does get published eventually. Data is often withheld for many reasons. Usually, the scientists simply want first credit for the work - early release of info would give competing labs an advantage. In this case, it's not to push a project to market, but to show goos results to get further funding for the same or related projects. There is a limited amount of funding available from government sources (NIH, NSF, etc.) and the review committees who look at grants demand to see results before they fund research. Current and past publications are indications of the scientist's success. Also, publications are often used as a meter-stick of productivity and original thinking when deciding tenure and graduation of Ph.D.'s so there is considerable interest in keeping data secret to get the publication. Publications will not be accepted if it's been done already by your competitor.
Relating to genetic research specifically, whether it's patented, published, or not, there is a huge heap of genetic data in the NIH GenBank database:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
IANAL but I believe you can subpoena federally funded projects under the Freedom of Information Act (5 USC 552). This would probably be very obnoxious though, but I think I read somewhere that certain large corporations have tried this to effectively steal research data from federally funded projects for their own private (secret, unpublished) efforts.