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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."
well, if you look at the last decade in Genetic research, Scientists are allowed to patent the genes that they dicover.......this has lead to the unwillingness to share since sharing would cost them the potential money that can be made with the gene........I have always said that Patents on genes was a bad disision.......at the turn of the 20th century, scientists tried to patent Elements on the periodic table......the were not allowed because they belonged to everyone.....well, how is that logic diffrent for Genes?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
From the article:
Forty-seven percent of the academic geneticists who asked other colleagues for information, data and materials related to published research were turned down...
Coincidentally, a vast percentage improvement over their collective attempts at dating.
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.
True enough. It's a shame that the effect of the patent system, currently, is to choke off innovation and information sharing.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I really enjoyed reading your last paragraph:
There's very little difference between proprietary software and "closed-source" science. Both put profits before progress.
I believe that's the most karma-whorific sentence I've ever read on /. (or anywhere else, for that matter). While we're on the subject though, there were a whole lot of tech IPO's promoting open source projects that were supposed to be "gold mines"... why don't you whine about those?
I'm always one that disproved and disapproved of statistics in general when it comes to drawing societal conclusions.
Reading the data of the survey performed and then reading the ChicTrib article, I'm suprised moneymaking was brought up as an issue. Since, a good breakdown of why information is denied didn't show any indication that money was a factor:
- "80% reported that it required too much effort to produce the materials or information" - This is so true. Having done chemistry and biology research with joint teams in Germany, it is hard to disseminate and gather info for specific inqueries. Especially with alot more folks asking about research being done in this area. It would have been good to do a trend analysis on how many requests for specific research come in on different areas of science... chemical, physics, quantum... vs genetics
- "64%, that they were protecting the ability of a graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, or junior faculty member to publish" - This again is so very true. If you release some info regarding your current research and give it to another group, and they publish material first, you just lost your chance to fulfill your thesis project. You can't do something original in a thesis that has already been done. Can't blame them for denying requests.
- "53%, that they were protecting their own ability to publish" - This is probably the most "iffy" reason. When it comes to publishing papers, if you use one glob of info from another team that you didn't do yourself, that is one more person to include in on the contributing authors. Alot of scientists want to minimize their involvement with other projects, to eliminate backlash, being held back by wrong data, or confirmation of results in data.
Also, the ChicTrib article makes a gross quotation in leaving out that 47% of geneticists only had at least 1 request denied in the past 3 years. And this was just in regards to published research vs. ongoing. The article makes it seem that scientists aren't sharing any info at all, which is just bad news.
All in all, shame on Mr Peter Gorner for a horriably twisted article, grossly manipulating the facts, then considering is an academia "science" article in ChicTrib.
The stats from JAMA clearly refer to published research needing scientist to relinguish info, so other scientists can refute, rebut, and challenge the validity of a complex and controversial area.
Having done meta-analytic research and genomic research as well, I can tell you this scares the hell out of me, but is also something that isn't limited to genetics at all.
There are rampant problems with private corporate interests having too much influence over the scientific process. I have written numerous legislators about this and it drives me crazy. All these current societal problems--with IP, patent law, and scientific corruption--intersect in bioinformatics and genomics to a horrific extent. It's discouraging enough and makes me sad enough that I've felt like abandoning the field altogether, against my interests (I haven't though).
However, scientific sharing of information isn't as widespread as it sometimes is made out to be, and is lacking in a number of fields (like psychology, which I happen to be a part of). The simple explanation behind the findings--supported by the link--is that people are usually just too lazy, busy, or scared by belligerent critics to give information out to others. I ask for information for meta-analyses all the time, and usually only get replies about 50% of the time. Even when I do, I know the person somewhat, know someone who knows them, or have some sort of institutional affiliation with them (i.e., have the same graduate school alma mater).
Although corporitization is a problem, it's simply not necessary to explain lack of sharing of scientific information. The real causes, although equally disturbing and frustrating, are probably far more mundane.
I guess the really scary thing is that corporatization might make these problems worse than they are.
I think it's equally obvious that patents do not "choke off innovation". Who out there is not trying to think of better ways to do things just because bad patents have been granted? Preventing people from using inventions (even if they are obvious in retrospect) doesn't choke off innovation. Profit, maybe, but not innovation.
I have had to witness the rapid, (indeed reckless) transition of the field from a public forum into a private industry. The majority of bench geneticists now, sadly, work for private firms making money off of techniques that were developed with public money. No money ( and precious little data) flows back from the private to the open public sector. As a result, Public, open Science dies. At the major Universities where I have worked, many of the scientists have had to shut down research due to lack of funding, and are not being replaced. Now there are long open stretches of hallway, consisting of empty labs and labs converted into storage rooms or ad-hoc conference rooms. Yet few of the biotech firms responsible for the diminishment of academic science realize that they are sawing off the branch on which they sit. A corporation simply can't openly perform Peer review, for fear of giving away corporate secrets. And without Peer review, Scientific endeavor ceases to be science at all, but becomes R+D as you would find in any corporation. the nearest analogy i can find is that of Alchemy. In the beginning of the renaissance, philosphers began to realize that on could manipulate the porties of substances. Rather than sharing their data with each other, and focus on the understanding of matter, they instead chose to individually pursue research dedicated to pure commercial value (i.e. the synthesis of gold). 600 years of tinkering with mercury and sulfur proved fruitless. It took only 150 years of peer reviewed work, aimed at nothing but pure scientific understanding, to understand the true principles of chemistry (and the fact that gold cant be made by chemical processes).
That is the idea, anyway... in my former position at a dot-com, the management wanted to obtain a software patent based on some work I had done. Their advice to me for describing my software for the patent was (more or less in these words) "make it descriptive enough so that we can sue anyone who tries to do something similar, but vague enough so that it would not be of much use to anyone trying to figure out how to do the same thing". I trust not all patents are done with this sort of mindset, but any that are, are certainly not doing much to help the public good.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
If I were back in grad school again, I would focus exclusively on developing commercially viable or militarily useful things, and avoid publishing the details. Because:
- the only person the publications benefit are the faculty member who will take credit for your research, not you, the grad student or postdoc that actually did the research.
- the only people conference proceedings benefit are your competitors--theft is simplyrampant.
- if what you share is a fact that's at variance with prior or in-press publications of powerful faculty academics, your work will get stomped on for political reasons, no matter how valid the facts you report are (remember what David Baltimore did to Margot O'Toole when her research discredited his?)
99% of what goes on in universities is just a bunch of political games, and has nothing to do with discovering or establishing anything resembling the truth. So why bother?Looks like the faculty members are tired of watching their students do this, and are trying it on themselves -- after being content with merely raping their students' ideas and research for so many decades, they've suddenly realized that there are bigger fish to fry than fat government grants (that the administration takes more than half of anyway).
"Big, Big Science. Every man, every man for himself." -- Laurie Anderson
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.
Open source and communication in computing brought C, Unix, the Internet, e-mail, etc.
What has your information-control ethic brought? .NET? Wait and see how well THAT works.
The concern is simply that the attitude you seem to approve of tends to stifle progress. Of course, you could simply insist on your self-centered view and insist that the resulting rate of progress is the best of all possible worlds. Buy some old copies of 'Pravda' from the post-collapse Soviet Union, that could help show you how to argue such points...
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
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Close.
.. prior to 1776.)
... all of these have, when the occasion permitted, attempted with varying degrees of success to monopolize secrets. The justification for the existence of patents it to loosen up the grip on those secrets. Therefore one of the requirement for a patent is supposed to be a description accurate enough that one "skilled in the field" will be able to easily recreate the patented device. And this is why things that are obvious aren't supposed to be patentable.
By sharing your knowledge, you benefit other people, and potentially damage yourself. By accepting their sharing it, you benefit yourself.
People usually recommend that others act in ways benefit them. They usually act in ways that they see as beneficial to themselves.
Before the explosive broadening of the coverage of the patent laws, the academic criterion was used, so that by publishing your findings, you benefited yourself. Once patents were broadened, schools started to consider that research findings were "classified", and patents were seen as a source of money. So the criteria changed.
The schools were responding in a predictable way to changes in the law, and the scientists have responded in a predictable way to the changes in the schools. There are intermediate cases, also, e.g. scientists who get the patents in their own names, and are entreprenurial enough to start their own companies.
This is similar in many ways to England at the start of the industrial revolution. England went to some lengths to prevent the knowledge of how to build the powered machinery from being exported. It was, eventually, but by that time England had gained sufficient power that Napoleon couldn't stand against it, and the British Empire was created. (And it was one of the things that was being surpressed in the American colonies
Nations, guilds, unions, professions, families
If one looks at the current patent law, at least in application, one sees exactly how well this intention is being executed. (Ugh! It's being done so poorly we'd be better off without ANY patent law.)
But these are the standard ways that people act in situations. If the environment encourages sharing, then people share. If it encourages possessiveness, then people are possessive. The current environment is still a bit mixed, but it has tilted strongly in favor of secretiveness and possessiveness in the last few decades. Now, if you have the money, you can patent nearly anything. Feverish dreams of wealth inspire people who haven't a chance of benefiting to support still more restrictive proposals. They can at least dream of winning.
The results of these changes are that the access to benefits is being restricted to a smaller and smaller proportion of the populace. (Well, these benefits were always the property of a minority. Most people won't miss them.) And the imbalance between the upper (most wealthy) levels and the lower levels (the subsistence) has increased. In Athens the ratio betweent the top and the bottom (excluding slaves and women) was about 50, i.e., the richest person owned/earned about 50 times as much as the poorest. There is justification for a larger degree of separation in our civilization. If it's going to be structured as a hierarchy, and that seems to be the simplest organization that people are comfortable with, then there needs to be a larger number of levels than Athens had, and one of the marks of separation that people accept is degree of wealth. But one could easlily argue that in our current civilation it has gotten much too extreme. I think that an absolute limit of, say, 1000 times would be reasonable. I.e., nobody would be allowed to earn more than 1000 times the minimum wage (or, perhaps, the welfare payment). Anything in excess would be taxed at the rate of 100%. This would allow the wealth of the most wealthy to increase at the same rate as the wealth of society as a whole increased.
A top heavy pyramid fosters insane dreams of wealth, and dreams of insane wealth. And this is one of the things that has happend to the quest for knowledge.
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The idea of patents is good, the present implementation is lousy.
1) Too many patents are granted without any "thorough description of how it works." If this is an attempt to gain the protection of the patent without giving up the trade secrets, it's breaking the basic bargain involved in patents. And if it's a case of trying to patent an undeveloped idea so as to be able to sue whoever later actually delivers a working invention, then granting such vague patents does indeed choke off innovation.
What is needed is a requirement that either the description be clear enough that engineers can construct a working device, or a working device be delivered to and stored at the expense of the patent requestor. If you can't prove that you knew how to build the device at the time of the patent application, the patent is void.
2) Too many patents are granted covering ideas which are NOT new. The Australian patent office granted a patent for the wheel, and the US granted a patent for "training using a manual." The wheel patent application was a prank. The training manual application appears to be serious -- but are they going to sue the US Army for training methods that were old in 1940, or are they going to try to bully some small company into coughing up the dough rather than facing an expensive trial?
More typically (and the training manual patent may be one of these), the patent will mix one small new idea in with lots of old ideas, then claim it all. The PO should sort out the prior art in these, but obviously the US, Aussie, and presumably most other PO's have been overwhelmed until this is no longer possible. This puts the onus on companies trying to produce other products incorporating those old ideas to sort out what was really patentable, and possibly defend their interpretation in court.
There is no penalty for over-reaching like this. So I have suggested before: If two or more claims in a patent application are proven bogus, it is entirely disallowed, published, and any actual innovations contained therein become public domain.
3. It costs too much to challenge a bogus patent in court, or even to do the research to determine that it is provably bogus. The first fix for this is a "loser pays" system for legal costs. Second, I suggest that when a patent is granted the patent-holder be required to post a bond of, say, $10,000. If someone challenges the patent and the patent-holder chooses not to answer the challenge ("Gee, I didn't know the US Army used training manuals in 1940"), this bond pays (some of) the challenger's expenses. If the patent-holder takes it to trial and loses, the bond is just a tiny down-payment on what he'll owe...