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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."
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.
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.
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