The Opening of Biotech

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."

Comments

Re:Uhoh

[Angostura]

What?! My licence specifically says that I am allowed to make one (1) copy of myself for off-site back-up.

Great, now we're going to have 5C13nCe n00b5

[3.5 stripes]

The big question is who is going to write the manuals. It's not as if biotech isn't already difficult enough.

Common Sense

[spoonboy42]

Well, the impact of this all depends on what is meant by "tools". A lot of the tools of the trade for genetic research (lysing and ligand enzymes, PCR machines, etc.) can easily be purchased from many scientific suppliers, and the methods for creating such tools are well enough known that they can easily be replicated (at my old high school, I kid you not, the Biology teacher and some students constructed a fully functional home-made PCR setup using off-the-shelf hobbyist robotics compnents).

Now, what I'm thinking is that this fellow is proposing "open research". This is a direct reaction to the flurry of biotech patents we've seen over the last few years. Instead of jeleaously gaurding any new biotechnological inventions or discoveries, they would be shared with the community and opened up for peer review. My, that sounds familiar... maybe because it's what the process of scientific inquiry has depended on for centuries. In fact, you might recall that when RMS founded the FSF, his goal was to rekindle the spirit of "software as science" that had existed in the early days of computing. In the days of "biotech as business", scientific openness is an old idea whose time has once again come.