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."

Comments

Hard to figure out?

[the_2nd_coming]

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?

Re:Hard to figure out?

[s20451]

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

Before you rush to place the usual blame on intellectual property, look at the results of the study. The top three reasons for witholding information were, in order:

1. Too much effort to comply with request;
2. Protecting a student's ability to publish; and
3. Protecting one's own ability to publish.

None of these have to do with patenting, but 2 and 3 likely have to do with self-interest in an incredibly competetive research environment. You wouldn't want to help a competing group to scoop your own research before you had a chance to completely analyze it.

Clearly, self-interest is at play here -- not an unlikely quest for riches from patenting (the odds of which are somewhat akin to playing the lottery), but the more mundane quest for tenure and grant funding.

Re:Hard to figure out?

[sam_handelman]

I have always said that Patents on genes was [sic] a bad disision [sic] ... scientists tried to patent Elements ...

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 ... - Tribune

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]

Re:Hard to figure out?

[J. J. Ramsey]

"an individual gene is not a fundamental aspect of nature"

"Fundamental aspect" has nothing to do with it. Look, patents are supposed to regulate *inventions,* human-manufactured artifical creations.

"There are extensive and legimitate differences between a patent on a gene and a patent on an element."

However, unless one is talking about a gene that has been modified, genes are no more inventions than elements are. Both are from nature and are discovered, not made.

Re:Greed

[zaius]

That's actually not true. If you had read the Chicago Tribune article (which I doubt you did) or the JAMA article (which I really doubt you did), you would have noticed that it gave reasons for _why_ scientists were witholding information. About 60% witheld information to preserve the ability of grad students and junior faculty to publish it, and about 50% witheld info so they could publish it later. While the second reason may be slightly selfish, that's the way science has been for hundreds of years. Furthermore, if nobody gave grad students anything to put in their dissertations, nobody would be getting PhD's anymore, and then we'd fall a few decades behind in research. READ THE ARTICLES!!!

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?

statistics and there meaning....

[wavecentral]

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.

Re:Sharing and Patents

[Ben Jackson]

True enough. It's a shame that the effect of the patent system, currently, is to choke off innovation and information sharing.

A patent grants a temporary monopoly on an invention in return for a thorough description of how it works. Getting a patent requires information sharing. Without the patent process it would be imperative for companies to conceal their intellectual property. The patent process rewards them for sharing. Go back 17-20 years and you have a pile of millions of inventions that you can use freely, each one carefully described and illustrated.

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.

As a Former Molecular Biologist

[Lord_HalfJack]

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).

Re:perhaps you should find out what patents are...

[Jeremi]

If you patent something, then you are by definition sharing it. Patents are public, for all to see

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.

How right you are! (semi-rant)

[epepke]

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.