Slashdot Mirror
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 know the humane genome project has been plagued by this since the start. The various companies working on it are very hesitant to release information to their competitors, as pharmeceutical companies could make literally billions of $$ with some of the discoveries that have been made.
This lack of sharing for sure has been detrimental to the progress of this research, but without the motivation of potential proft, I'm sure there would be even fewer people working on it. Let's face it, it would be great if everyone worked on things like this "to make the world a better place," but most of the financial backers are doing it "to make a crap load of money."
The future isn't what it used to be.
Why is reproducibility important? Let's say group A reports some really neat genetics in mice. Group B doesn't have much interest in reproducing it in mice (little potential for scientific rewards) but tries the same thing in primates and it doesn't work. Without being able to reproduce the work of group A, group B doesn't know whether there is a genuine difference in primates, whether there is something wrong with their procedure, or whether group A just published an incorrect or fraudulent result.
Peer reviewers for reputable journals should insist on reproducibility, which should include a binding offer by the authors to make available all necessary materials to other scientists to reproduce the results and build on them. If anything else were to get published, it should at least be marked in big, red letters as "irreproducible" and should not count much towards someone's scientific publication record--after all, it might all be invented.
I think you'll find that very little has changed lately. Scientists have always been very careful about what information they share with others, for fear of giving an advantage to competitors.
If a project is in the early stages, you don't talk about it at all.
If a project has produced some great results, and it is well in progress, you'll talk about it, but might be a bit hazy on the details. For example, take a geneticist who is hunting for genes contributing to a certain disease. He/she has it partially narrowed down, and is showing a map of the BACs and YACs in the candidate region. Try asking them what chromosome they are looking at. They won't tell you.
If a project is near complete, and is being written up or has already been submitted to a journal, you'll be very open. The odds of being "scooped" at this point are minimal.
These rules vary somewhat depending on whether we're talking about a resource-rich lab that works on projects almost no one else can do, or a small lab doing projects that can be rapidly repeated somewhere else. But in general I think they hold true, and have for many years.
There seems to be a fair number of people actually employed in these fields responding to this article, so this seems like a good place to ask this question.
It appears to me that we're pretty far along when it comes to the biology of sickness-by-infection, where an illness is caused by being attacked by other organisms. There's a long way to go, but it seems to an outsider that most of the fundimental processes are understood, and the lion's share of what remains is of the nature of "find germ, study germ, develop treatment that kills germ without killing host"
But it also seems that we're not very far along when it comes to understanding sickness-though-internal-breakdown, where actual body processes either fail to function or function abnormally.
It strikes me that understanding how human genetics really work is the key to all survival. If we knew how every gene and every internal process functioned, then we cound re-engineer our own genome to fix problems. Eliminate cancer, eliminate AGING, and so forth.
It would thus suggest to me that working on deciphering the human genome is the most important problem in human biology in history, and perhaps even the most important problem EVER.
We should have huge amounts of public money poured into this problem, with all results made public, and all information shared.
Would you agree? Have I made any erronious assumptions?
DG
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