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Human Trials Underway In China For SARS Vaccine

Posted by timothy on from the moving-quickly dept.

da_foz writes "A SARS vaccine has begun human trials in Beijing. The vaccine was devoloped with the help of some open source software, a couple details about what was used can be found here. Here is an interesting quote from the second link: 'The Director of the Genome Sciences Centre, Dr. Marco Marra, said he personally requested that his name not be included on the patent application as the scientist who found the genetic sequence. "This stems largely from a personal belief that DNA sequence is a discovery as opposed to an invention and should not be patentable," he said.'"

7 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Patented Discoveries by Alphanos · · Score: 4, Funny

    "This stems largely from a personal belief that DNA sequence is a discovery as opposed to an invention and should not be patentable,"

    Pfft. That's silly. Newton should've patented gravity:).

    (For the humour-impaired: this is a joke:)

    --
    Alphanos
    1. Re:Patented Discoveries by martinX · · Score: 4, Informative

      Hmmm, should this comment be moderated "informative"?

      --
      When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
  2. Philosophically, all is discovery by Thinkit4 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The law of right triangles, the best of Mozart or Shakespeare, and the theory of gravity are all discoveries. Nobody creates an idea. All ideas, in all their forms, are discovered. It's just more obvious if it's an island, or DNA.

    --
    -I am an elective eunuch.
    1. Re:Philosophically, all is discovery by Feztaa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, the main difference between discovery and invention is that a discovery is something that already existed, that you found. An invention is something you thought up, that nobody ever thought of before.

      I support his claim that discoveries should not be patentable.

  3. This shocked the hell out of me by 7-Vodka · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Because I work at a company that is currently sending our SARS treatment to china. Our treatment is not a vaccine but rather a monoclonal antibody which would be administered post infection; and was indeed started with the sequence posted on the internet by these guys.
    More details of this vaccine would be nice though.

    --

    Liberty.

  4. An interesting irony by the_other_one · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a CBC article about a Chinese vaccine for a disease that has killed relatively few people (statistically speaking).

    Earlier today on CBC Radio One (Toronto 99.1) they were discussing the fact that it is illegal to import antiviral drugs into China for children with HIV. Even though there is not any Chinese manufacturer of such drugs.

    Drug use must be rampant within the Chinese government beauracracy.

    --
    134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
  5. Gene patenting is outrageous by Nomihn0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would liken it to the patenting of the value of pi. Imagine that. People could only use pi up to a certain significant digit because of a possible patent infringement. It is a derived, discovered, value. Genes, and pi, are simply observationsof the functioning of the universe. Unlike the similar JPEG problem, nothing in its own right is being created. Maybe entire synthetic genomes should be patentable, but certainly not any that occur naturally and are simply observed and decoded.