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: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?

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).