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The Opening of Biotech

Posted by Hemos on from the genes-just-wanna-be-free dept.

RockinRobStar writes "ABC Science have posted an article about an Australian geneticist, Dr Richard Jefferson, pushing for "free access to the scientific tools of modern biology and genetics...just as computer programming tools were shared in the open source software movement." "The scientific tools...would be licensed under a similar agreement as the general public licence". Dr Jefferson plans to present his program to the World Economic Forum in January."

2 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Done Deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    pubmed

    golden path

    bioconducter

    public library of science

    gnumeric

    cluster analysis

    etc. etc. etc.

    What's the BFD ??? A lot of scientists are on the open source bandwagon and have been for years. Walmart's coming to town and the Ivory Towers are falling.

  2. Much is already freely available by John+Hawks · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know what this guy is talking about. You can already do substantial genetic research with freely available tools and data from the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. A major area of granting by both NIH and NSF is the creation of open source or freely available software for genetic research. I would say that bioinformatics is one of the most active areas for free software development today. I would say that the largest problem in biotech is not that tools are closed access, but that companies can patent biological and genetic information that they discover with their open access, publically developed tools.