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Open Source for Biotechnology
LarsWestergren writes "The Economist claims that Open Source is such a success for software development, the model should be used more often in areas such as biotechnology and bioinformatics. The similarity between open source and the academic process with their 'you share, I share' principles is shown by the human genome project. The paper argues that this process should be used for instance to developing medicines unburdened by patents, useful especially for third world countries or diseases that affect relatively few people, where medical corporations have previously thought that the cost of research have not been worth it."
I'd say that the human genome is fairly open source.
Tho I can see Darl McShyster trying to claim that since everyone's DNA is 99.99% similar to his it must have been copied and we all need to buy $399 Life Licences...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Which is probably why something like this will never be allowed to happen now that people have seen how successful open source is.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Open sourcing discoveries in bio-tech would lead to reduced research costs, reduced development times and ultimatly reduced prices of drugs.
..GNU for biotech
It will also by extendtion lead to more competition in the bio-tech industry, which can only be a good thing. And it will lead to more consumer scrutiny of what were popping into our bodies.
This is a good idea all round. Except of course for the biotech monopolies who...
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May the Maths Be with you!
So, when some of the strange, undocumented side effects of this open-source medication turns you blue, do you think the average Ethiopian will have net-access to go crawling through some message boards looking for a fix? Just kiddin' yo, but I couldn't resist.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
the way drugs are developed in a patent based profit world by big companies will mean that big companies will be slow on the uptake as they want to control their market share 100%
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
This is an argument that Steven Weber makes in The Success of Open Source, which I reviewed recently. For more info, check out the list of reviews I've put together. While it's possible that the Economist thought of the idea on its own, I'm disappointed they didn't at least mention his previous work.
....i.e., right here. Looks sort of GForge-ish, although with frames and a custom theme and such-like...
The Army reading list
hey! hey! My privates are proprietary
The Human Brain project funds neuroinformatics projects, many of which are released under free or open source licenses.
Communism is more like "You share your things with me and the other fellows in power, or else you're on your way to the goulags."
My blog
I've been saying this for ages - we need a bitoechnology GPL. In other words, you are free to use the technology and incorporate it into your own research/product developments etc., but if you distribute a product that uses this, your process must be made available under the same licencing conditions. So if I invent a process that's useful in producing a wonder drug, anyone can use it, but all other aspect of this wonder drug must be available for others to improve upon.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Open-source software? No problem. Unencumbered research? No problem, and I assume non-profit organizations or government sources are paying. However, as I like my drugs tested before taking them, who other than these non-profits will pay the cost to test the proto-drugs?
No patent protection = no profits. No profit = no investment, and no desire to fund tests.
Does that mean in ten years, we will bemoan the fact the Pfizer owns a prohibitive majority of the market share, and that argue that the free stuff put together in some Danish guy's basement is as good as the stuff they charge for?
Wikipedia is another example of open-source-like methods being applied to a non-software area. Only time will tell exactly how successful it is, of course.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I remember reading a very recent Wired magazine article where advances in technology has made it possible to create in the open domain what we should call genetically improved crops, essentially genetic cross-breeding without creating a whole new genome from scratch for the crop at vastly faster rates than normal.
The article mentioned how rice crops in India thanks to computerized genetic analysis for cross-breeding resulted in a rice crop that had 20-30% higher yields and vastly improved resistance to insect, parasite and fungal pests.
The simple truth is that patents really are a lie about free market economics. They treat it like it's a physical property, but it's not. If millions of people use my car it deprives me use of it in a serious way, but if millions of people use the same invention - then just the opposite happens. The inventor is not only able to keep and use his original invention however he wants, but also now has huge forces contributing to it's improvement.
... they paid for those slaves God blessed, surely that alone shows slavery is good, and the negros have been saved from their barbaric condition" ....
... etc. - it really causes one to think.
If the government gave someone a monopoly on making cars, because they didn't have an incentive to make cars when other people can make them too - most of us would see that as crap. Market share isn't an inherent property right. If the government gave someone a monopoly on growing oranges, on the premise that they wouldn't have an incentive to grow oranges if other people could too - most people would see that as crap too. But for some reason, that logic breaks down when it comes to invention.
Finally, looking back on history to paraphrase "look at the great wealth and prosperity of the plantation system, the grand architecture, the vast and rich land, the free markets
I wish I could say that patents are causing less harm, but when they recently lokcked out 10's of millions of Africans dying of AIDS from getting generics because "they had no incentive", because patents are "a property right", becasue "the wealth of the pharmasutical industry in the US is proof that patents work"
Communism and Open Source do sound similar (in their principles). The parent (was probably a troll) but only because they knew that everyone would see them saying "sounds like something bad to me" instead of "sounds like communism to me." Communism isn't necessarily bad. I was thinking in the shower (before I saw this article) that communism is a set-up where everyone benefits by the greater good of the community. This works by making sure everyone can benefit from the efforts of individuals. Sounds like Open Source doesn't it?
the drug company multi-nationals, I'd like to strongly dissuade everyone from pursuing this idea. If the "people" are free to concentrate on unpatentable, abandoned and unprofitable medicines in some sort of collaborative effort, this will severely hamper our efforts to develop ever faster erectile dysfunction medicines, baldness cures in a pill form, medicines for newly created social "disorders", drugs to strip the carbs out of everything (or proteins or whatever the new black is) and have people pay top dollar for them. Stop rocking the boat and someday we'll find a cure for something (as long as it's profitable).
Then all the technical superiority of the western world is based on communism? Because that technical superiority is to a large part based on research following this principle. I doubt that research would be as far as it is were this principle not followed.
Indeed, one of the main measures of scientific success is the number of publications (unfortunately not taking into account the quality of those), that is, you are considered a better scientist if you added more to the community. Indeed, that measure can be crucial to your career (if you don't publish your results, i.e. don't share, then you'll never get far in the scientific community).
Note that also the incentive of the patent system was to encourage people to share their knowledge. You cannot patent something without publishing it, and that means after your patent expires, it's free knowledge for anyone to use.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Check out www.emboss.org. We used this software in lab I used to work in. Too bad its plug is being pulled.
Check out http://www.randomfactory.com/
for cd distributions of Open source Biotech software prebuilt for Linux.
Considering that, in the U.S. at least, most basic medical research is carried out at taxpayer expense it is about time that the fruits of that labour be availible to all taxpayers.
Democracy is like "you vote for a guy and then the Supreme Court will decide"
There are successful ways to implement something and unsuccessful ways to implement something. Communism isn't inherently bad, anymore then Democracy is. But look at Iraq, that was a democracy.
Who is the biotech equivalent of M$, eh?
;)
Surely this corp would show the same love to open source as M$ do?
As someone who works in bio-nano-tech it sounds like a great idea. With one obvious flaw......Drug companies! They will probably instantly knock the living bejesus out of anyone who actually publishes. They already use the academic community as hired monkeys, since the information only flows one way (and the profits). Once the trillioin dollar profits are on the line the gloves will be off.
Hmmmmmm
In an article some time ago, this was covered already. It's quite interesting ro read, the relation to biotech is on page 4 (Monsate et al).
Having these types of projects being "open source" is a very good idea. The exchanged and access of information will not only allow more people to work on a project but for medicines it would in theory make them safer. Instead of having to take a drug companies word about a product you would have direct access to all the research and testing of said product from the beginning to the end.
h tml )have to make you wonder.
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This open source idea for medicine and science would run into the same problem that open source software runs into. Greed.
People trying to get more money because they think they are entitled to it. Some examples would be Microsoft and SCO.
CEO Darl McBride who is at the helm of The SCO Group is leading the charge so to speak against open source software with claims to owning rights. Honestly most people realize this is a bid for them to be either bought out or to gain money from legal battles. This strategy is employed because it has the potentional to make money. SCO having not really made any innovations and in a steady decline over the years in terms of revenue and stock value has choosen this path. Now personally I think it was McBride's idea based on his track record with IKON Office Solutions. But then again the shady nature of SCO and it's parent company (explained here: http://www.forbes.com/2003/06/18/cz_dl_0618linux.
Microsoft on the other hand was sued due to a patent being violated by their Internet Explorer web browser. Reference here: http://news.com.com/Microsoft+appeals+Eolas+decis
Not to get into a rant about IP and software Patents but both of these cases show how money can be obtained through legal matters instead of the time honored method of working for it. No matter which way either case goes the problem is with old laws and ideas messing up the free (as in beer) trade of ideas and information.
Hopefully in the science field something like the above examples would not happen but there is always a chance. Big drug companies would not go quietly into the night if their development processes suddenly became public access and with more competition driving overall prices down. Big business loves to stay as BIG business.
Personally the idea behind "open source" science and medicine is very sound and will help many people in the long term. I just hope the process of it becoming free is less painful than the software industry.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
Well, it has been argued many times and there is abundant evidence to support the notion that the success of the US wouldn't have been anything like it has if it weren't, in fact, a fairly socialist nation.
Teachers like to joke that the Democratic party is actually merely a front for the National Education Association and it's not that far from the truth. And when you look at this huge pillar of the American community that is the education system, you can easily see that it is a form of welfare state.
Look at the recent shake-up at Disney to knock Eisner down a peg. Who did that? That was done by the California Pulic Enployees Retirement System, CalPers. So, all the rhetoric about America fighting against socialism is just that, we've been socialists all along.
For an opposite scale view, I wouldn't start a company that designs houses and just give away the blue prints. I just don't think that it will work across the board. In an ideal world it would, but just how Communism looks great on paper, when you apply ideas to a real world environment they don't work; people just aren't that nice. No one really wants to give away their ideas for free...or at least most people don't want to invest money in an idea or principle not looking to make a profit.
I am just glad that Open Source movement works in the IT world. It's not even the mainstream way to do it, but luckily the minority of people who believe in something, do the majority of the computing in the world. That's why it works.
That's just my opinion....it's probably wrong.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Yes, yes...the future IS open source, we all know
I've always believed it, its a pity we are so slow to move towards this goal. If theres any hope for sustainability and equality and peace for the future, the principle of open source needs to prevail everywhere in everything in my opinion.
_= Funny question=_: ->
->Do you believe in OSS in encryption. In some peoples eyes Im sure its probably a contradiction - How can you embrace OSS if you want to encrypt everything, but I think its a beautiful thing. AES is public encryption and Im sure there are a good few OSS implementations of it, and I would also argue its well implemented because of scrutiny from the public.
I believe in a future of OSS everything, but still, secrets to still exist!
But really, doesn;t this open up a whole argument.
For me for example!, I have no problem with Microsoft encrypthing everything, as long as they still show us whats beneath all the encryption - which they don't obvious;y,..interestin argument in my opinion...
We (http://www.ecoinformatics.org/) develop open source software for ecologists to help in there research. We have multiple projects. (http://www.ecoinformatics.org/projects.html) For example, KNB (http://knb.ecoinformatics.org) is a server that we maintain. It is like a library for datasets. Ecologists can store the datasets which they collect from their research. In turn search can be done on the datasets based on various attributes like geographic, taxonomic or temporal informations. The server is based on a software that we are developing - Metacat (http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/metacat/). There is also a java client that we are developing for interacting with the server - Morpho(http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/morp ho/). And both of these talk to each other in EML - Ecological Metadata Language. (http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/eml/)
Cool stuff!!!
All of the above are open source and can used by anybody.
A lot of development in bioinformatics is already open source. Check out http://www.bioperl.org http://www.biojava.org
I don't think this will work, and let me tell you why. First off, let me preface this by saying that my wife is a soon-to-be pharmacologist, so while I may not have any firsthand knowledge of this, she knows what she is talking about.
1) The cost of research for pharmacology is infinitely (no not literally) more expensive than it is for computer science. In most research for CS you just have to pay for cost of equipment (basic computers typically costing a hell of a lot less than the specialized machines used in development of medicine) and the salary of the researcher. A lot of CS research can be done by one person. For pharmacology you have the cost of equipment (or even the USE of it, sometimes they have to rent time on more uncommon machines; this happens in CS as well, but not nearly as often since it's mainly for the processing power) as well as the cost of the researcher AND his/her assistants. It's almost impossible to do good research in medicine by one's self because of...
2) It takes freaking forever. The number of steps required to find out if a proposed theory for a molecule even has a chance for working is phenomenal. My wife has spent the past few months trying to see if a certain molecule will bond with an AIDS neutralizer. Mind you, this is just the first step. Even if this step does work (which they don't know yet) they don't know if this molecule will a) bond with the aids virus b) will it bond long enough to neutralize? c) if it does bond, will the neutralizing agent be able to reach the virus? or will it be blocked by the bonding molecule? And the list goes on. No pharmacologist who does this for a living is going to volunteer even MORE time out of their lives for no pay. So we'll pay them right?
3) Funding. Right now almost all pharmacology is financed by companies that already have patents or by third party investors. These people invest money into these projects because they expect a profit as return. Yes, I'm sure they also care for the well-being of others, but they do need to recover their costs if a drug succeeds. A vast majority of projects fail, which is why a lot of specialized medicines cost so much. These companies need to stay alive in order to do more research. And don't even talk to me about Federalizing the research. That would be pretty much the dumbest thing ever.
I'm sure there are holes in my argument, but hopefully this will at least provide food for thought and further discussion. Basically, I just don't see it happening.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
This sounds like a great idea on the surface, but any new drug or treatment still needs to go through a hugely expensive clinical trial process to verify safety and efficacy (at least in the developed nations). No company is going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to put a drug through the clinical trial process (laboratory testing on cultured cells, animal testing, trials with human subjects) if it is not going to be able to have a patent at the end to recoup their costs. The only way for patent-free drug-development to succeed is for governments and international bodies to fund the trial phase. And even then, the allocation of resources will be subject to a political process because there is not enough money to do all of the research that is demanded by every "disease special interest group." Developing new drugs just requires way too much money for it to done using the OSS model. Even outside of researchers' time, there are big costs associated with specialized lab space, equipment, materials, and the costs of compensating human subjects, insurance, etc. In the vast majority of cases, private donations will just not cover all of the costs.
Nice sentiments, but no one really expects reduced research costs, more competition in the bio-tech industry, or consumer scrutiny simply by "open sourcing" biotech info.
Rather, what the article points out is that there are niches - diseases which disproportionately affect the poor, that affect few people, or for which the patent for a drug has expired - which are ignored by drug companies. The costs of development and meeting regulation requirements would not be recovered in these situations. The article proposes to use an "open source" model to address these niches.
While the article does point out that a freer flow of information would help these situations, I think what the authors really want is the large army of (largely) volunteer brainpower that open source software has.
No offense man, but that is fucking insane.
My wife manages clinical trials and the amount of oversight is crazy. The hospital had to call her at 1:05 AM so she could approve a change in dosing a patient because the nurse was literally 5 minutes late in adminstering the drug because the protocol said "administer at 1 AM."
The point is, biotech costs a ridiculous amount of money. And even "the best in the world" aren't going to give up their research for free.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
1) Developing new drug products requires substantial, very expensive facilities, while the hard costs of software development are very low.
2) Drugs must go through a long and expensive testing and regulatory process before being released to the market. Open Source software simply wouldn't exist if it cost millions of dollars and took several years before you could release it.
3) There are massive costs associated with product liability in drugs - no one would give away software if the same liability exposure existed.
4) For every drug that makes it to market, there are dozens to hundreds that don't make it through the process but incur the costs of development anyway. The unsuccessful attempts are subsidized by the successful ones.
While I think that the sharing of information in biotech is generally a good thing, I don't think the economics mesh with a software-like "open source" model.
It is the cost of complying with the regulations of the FDA and other country's regulatory agencies.
A patent is only a mechanism for getting a return on the investment, and therefore allowing developing anything new in a capitalistic system.
Non-capitalistic systems don't work very well.
So, if you want cheap medicines and more medical development, the place to start is abolishing the FDA and all the other regulatory agencies.
These agencies cost lives: they prevent, to some extent, the use of dangerous or contaminated drugs and foods, but they do so at the cost of preventing the development of 1000s of new drugs per year and, most important, new points of view. For example, the FDA does not recognize aging as a disease, so won't evaluate any drug designed to prevent it.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
What is much more interesting, in my opinon is open source lab hardware and, in fact, there is such a thing. There is a team at at UCSD who's whole lab is dedicated to using plain old PC-CDRoms to do analysis of samples. That is far more empowering for the open source style of operation than just some academic collaboration that has settled on a database format.
The project is called Discode. I've written to the guy who is the head of the project for my own biotech site I started putting together last year. Right now they have a web page that is very cryptic, but they're looking for kernel hackers who have experience in CD-ROM drivers. Now, that's hot. That's real open source. At my still not quite public site, I have a few links to press releases of their first published paper on their work.
I've been working in Healthcare IT for nearly 9 years. As an open source advocate, I am really excited by the progress and interest I've seen lately in FOSS solutions in the healthcare realm. There was a time that I thought the open source model would never work in vertical markets. Boy, am I glad I was wrong! Check out LinuxMedNews to get an idea of how much is happening in this area.
Here are some links to projects that I find interesting and seem to have the most traction:
There are many, many more. These are just some that came to mind. If you work in healthcare, do yourself a favor and check out this thriving community!
Big Pharmas tend to develop hundreds of drugs per year. However, any drug that has a cost of production greater then 10% of its total cost is usually squashed due to the market. If those drugs were "given" in a "open source" manner, maybe some of those drugs would make it farther to help people. Who knows what drugs could have been developed and then squashed because it wouldnt make money?
Anyway, im trying to get a new website off the ground right now. If you are into the stock market or day trading then please check it out at GroupShares.com
Thanks,
Aj
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artlu.net
Just some examples of how bio very much is open already..
In biotech software, there's lots of open source. BioJava, BLAST.. etc.
As for what they're talking about, e.g. databases.. Most data already IS open. The human genome, protein structures and sequences.
Now, Open Sourcing knowledge may be a good or bad thing. In general, though, drug companies do research for patents, yes, but they also publish, so it's not like the academic community is getting cut out of the knowledge that drug companies have. Some of the most effective and innovative synthetic procedures for organic chemistry, for instance, were researched at Merck and published into the academic community.
Such irE
I'm all for opensource GM crops. But who's going to test to make sure it is doing what it suppose to do?
Um, I really don't think we want lots of people able to develop biological weapons in their basement. We already have enough problems with script kiddies making computer viruses, you'd think they'd learn.
This may be one of those technologies which creates a problem, the resolution of which is that the civilization making it gets knocked back to where it can no longer make the technology. (Classic examples from Science Fiction include certain general-purpose teleporters, as discussed in Niven's classic "On the Theory and Practice of Teleportation", and to a lesser degree the time viewer in Asimov's "The Dead Past".) I suppose that's one solution to the Fermi Paradox....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
because that's how much it takes to develop a new drug...
unlike software, where you can buy an IDE from compusa and crank away for under $100 (or for free)...pharmaceutical research and genetic study requires truckloads of cash...
The similarity between open source and the academic process with their 'you share, I share' principles is shown by the human genome project.
Very true. "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
This is propably even more insightful when applied to biotechnology than to software at large.
Speaking about biotechnology and free software, check out the bioperl project:
"Officially organized in 1995 and existing informally for several years prior, The Bioperl Project is an international association of developers of open source Perl tools for bioinformatics, genomics and life science research.
"Facilitated by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation we work closely with our friends and colleagues across many projects including biojava.org, biopython.org, DAS, bioruby.org, biocorba.org, EnsEMBL and EMBOSS.
"The Bioperl server provides an online resource for modules, scripts, and web links for developers of Perl-based software for life science research. We can also provide web, FTP and CVS space for individuals and organizations wishing to distribute or otherwise make freely available standalone scripts & code."
Very interesting.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Yeah, open source biotech sounds like a great idea. However, the high cost of drugs isn't caused by the research end of the work. The high cost comes from getting the drugs approved for human use. This cannot be open sourced since it is really, realy controlled testing.
The only way I can think of to reduce this cost is to create an independent, non-profit organization that does the work to get the drugs FDA approved (or even supplants the FDA as an arbiter of drug safety, like Underwriter's Labs does for electronics.)
>>Moreover, the results of the research would not be made available under an open-source licence of the kind that governs software projects. Instead, the final development of drug candidates would be awarded to a laboratory based on competitive bids.
Now why would the results go to the highest bidder? This Open Source BS is for rich and greedy corps to get the work done for free. They leave just enough open to say that anybody can do it, but tie your balls to a door post. Anyone, other than the those with the means, are allowed to manufacture it. Just smoke and mirrors to make everybody think they are contributing to a just cause.
Science is very expensive!
Lets make it free and then it won't be so expensive...there's just one problem all those hours spent in industry research to develop new reagents / methods. It also has a price, as in other people's effort...which requires compensation, other then the promise of better medicines 10 years from now.
The anology would be develop and produce open source hardware to interface with open source software. Surprisingly, the former is not just effort intensive, its expensive, and its more than just a hobby.
--remember someone needs to pay for processor and hardrive.
My solution : More grants!
what about research that is failed or inconclusive? this data has to be of use to someone, deadends and culdesacs are still a part of the larger map even if they dont go anywhere.
However, open source software is created by not just hobbyists and organizations of them, but also by corporations. Take MySQL AB, for example, their software development process is based on an open source model, and their database software is one of, if not the most widely deployed. The same could be true for pharmeceudicals, it just matters if a corporation can find a way to make it work.
Moreover, I cannot help but feel slightly insulted by your commentary on medicine and anatomy takes years of study to understand, as same is true for computer and electrical engineering, or any field for, that matter. Anyone can use a computer, and even begin to develop software for one, but in order to truly understand how computer systems operate and develop effective software, it requires many years of undergraduate and graduate study. To assume that all open source developers are the unwashed masses that don't have any formal education in the field is to make a horrible mistake. You would be suprised at the level of education of the average contributor to the Linux kernel, for example.
I work in the pharmacutical sector (IT in clinical trails).
Have you any idea how a drug gets to market? Not only do you have to find a drug (discovery) but you have prove a drug works and doesnt cause unwated side affects (clinical trails). All goverments have mandatory regulations requiring all drugs to go though an approval process. This approval process is very complicated and requires a massive amount of man time.
In the USA you have to pass the FDA regualtions.
In Europe you have to kinda of submit to europe and the individual counties (EU regs are a mess)
However the IT systems used by pharmcutical companies are, frankly, a mess. In addition pharmacutical companes get fleased by a few software vendors (SAS,documentum). Why the pharmacutical sector doesnt switch to using open source for their IT systems i really dont understand. I'm not talking Linux here.
For example, All the pharmcutical companies could donate 1% of their SAS license to an open source project to write an open source version of SAS. The industry would save billions (yes SAS is THAT expensive)
Every pharmacutical company has 100's of standard operating procedures for comply with FDA etc regs. Why not open source these?
There are some small open source projects for the pharmacutical sector, but industry sponsership/awareness is almost non existant.
Al
Open source (and by open source I'm thinking mostly of the GPL. I know other variants exist.) and the academic world share a different overall goal. The idea is to *advance the field*, not the wallet of anyone who controls the process. I'm talking about those MBAs who slice and dice everything to add dollar signs everywhere. Those MBAs are the same people that are in charge of the biotech research, not the geeks that do the research. It's all about the finance department.
I'm not really anti-capitalism, but I think the US has taken things toooooo far. Very extreme "me first" mentality.
This is big money we're talking about. No way is this stuff going to get let out the door without a lot of people taking their cuts.
you guys are totally nuts I guess.
all the OSS guys write OSS because they have a job that feeds their kids. OKAY? if you tell them they are out of their job, they wil turn their energies to doing somethign that wil pay the rent, and only after that will they turn to providing the world with free code.
Also, I have seen some crap that goes into OSS. I have seen ppl who have known java for a day go make changes to some pretty deep java code and check it back in.
I certainly do not want that in my drugs, thank you.
or may be because of the success fo a few OSS projects, people think that all OSS is great??
yeah, and how exactly are oSS drug developers going to make money? by offering support to people who turn blue and breathless from their drugs? or offering dosage advice to people who buy their drugs?
maybe it will be like : oh here are a list of ingredients you can buy and here's how you make this drug. you need gcc, a good matchbox, a cauldron.. and you might have to tweak the firewookd a little..
and yeah, a lot of edcation goes into making a scientist who develops drugs. as of now universities have nto reduced phd programs fees to zero.
just understand, tie spent on developing things have VALUE.
It appears that open source is making its way into the data side of things... See the The RCSB Protein Data Bank , the human genome sequencing, etc.
But the bottom line is the following:
It costs (currently) about US$800 million to $1 billion to develop a drug. That is all of the initial trials, screening, 3 phase clinical trials, etc. This is typically a 10 year process-(there are some exceptions, but this is generally true).
The _reason_ why any company would invest this sort of money is so that they could have a monopoly on making it for 20 years. If everything were open sourced, and anyone could make anyone else's drug, why would companies put this much money into developing it? They would have no incentive to do so.
As someone else mentioned- this is not the sort of thing that you can just do in your basement. The company I work for makes a fancy robotic incubator to help you crystallize proteins. People want to do this so they can put them in an xray machine to get their structure, which can lead to possibly designing drugs that might interact with that protein. This machine costs about US$250,000. People need it because protein crystallography is hard- there's no way to predict under which conditions it will crystallize. You typically need to try 10,000-100,000 different conditions to get a reasonably sized crystal, that you can diffract and get the structure from. Some proteins _never_ crystallize.
This is way before you are even trying _anything_ in a biological screen, let alone animal trials, let alone phase 1, 2, and 3 (human) clinical trials.
If you do successfully crystallize the protein (and determine the structure, which is very straightforward once you have a good crystal), you can (and everyone does) submit it to the protein databank, and you can publish these conditions in a paper. So in this sense, lower level biotech is/becoming open source. But the higher level stuff requires a lot more thought and resources.
I'm not saying that there's no waste or greed in big pharma- Of course there is, like any other industry. Perhaps its higher than average, due to the large potential amount of money to be made.
My point is that the places that open source is successful- coding, which requires a $300 computer with an internet connection; wikipedia, which requires the same; there is a very low cost of entry to contribute. Even if companies and universities start open sourcing the lower level stuff more than it is now, Animal and human trials costs very large sums of money. Why would a company invest $10's of millions on one part of a trial if someone else could end up making (and selling) the drug?
I agree that cheap drugs would be great. But if its open source, and people start dying because of a side effect of the drug, who is liable? Not to mention who will fill out the FDA paperwork (there has to be $10's of millions invested just in complying with the paperwork. I've heard estimates that it is basically a medium sized room full of paper. And that's for 1 (one) drug.) -E
-ETF EOM
If you read the articles, the economist takes a balanced approach, it clearly lauds the open model in some places, but it does acknowledge that the model doesn't work in other places.
Hopefully there are open source tools that I can get to know that will shift my computing skills up into a more profitable segment of the market, or maybe one that will be to the greater good.
I found a list of software used in http://bioinformatics.org/softwaremap/?form_cat=2 but I really need some insight from someone in the know what the top ten programs I can learn and be of use to more leaned users, such as writing scripts to get the damn things to work together fo example.
Just my 2 cent.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Last I heard, the human genome project was a great model of cooperation ... if by "cooperation" you mean "cutthroat race between competing academic and private-sector groups"...
Breakfast served all day!
I am not one who would enjoy open source genetics. Granted the potential learning curve for all those with interest but what about those with interest to harm? Punishing a pc virus/worm writer is one thing - but what about another virus write who happened to re-release the Bubonic plague or some other serious virus leading towards epidemic.
... Perhaps, say race?! There are a lot of organizations with fair chunks of flow that, if they determined could release a bacterium, virus or bacteriophage resulting in the genocide of a populace. Yes It's hard to believe, but well, the human 'source code' is a lot more intricate than something on your average PC (read: more options of control and specificity).
With an open source human genome this may add to more disaster if it's modified to attack something specific?
This is just the terror stepping stone, how much 'good' will come out of open source genetics? how much 'bad'?
That said, I, personally am one for OpenSource EVERYTHING. If that causes us, as a species, to erradicate ourselves then so be it; it just shows that we're too stupid to continue our existance.
From my experience (I currently work in the biotechnology sector) most information is already 'open source'. If you take into account all of the public universities and not-for-profit institutions (Mayo Clinc, TIGR, NIH, etc), you will find that most research is done in the public sector. All of the methodology and results are published (which can cost to get a copy, but you can always request one from the author for free - authors get hundreds of copies of their article) and are available to anyone who wishes to repeat or further the experimentation.
For the moment, lets assume that we're only dealing with basic GM (accellerated hybridization) and not transgenic crops -- although, click here for a great article about how GM crops will save the environment. You can also hit up this editorial in, of all places, the Yale Daily News.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
The Economist is usually very good in its bioscience articles. This article is completely abyssmal - the person who wrote it has absolutely no understanding of how scientific research works. and that is not flamebait but the sad truth
First of all, we are a bio-informatics lab - all the software we produce is open source. This is not the exception but the rule.
The motivation behind our research is not profit and again, in academia that is the rule not the exception.
The article states that if aspirin were the cure for cancer - it would not be developed because there would be no profit. If that is true then it is a reflection, not of a flawed scientific research model but rather a flawed biotech/pharmaceutical model
Researchers like myself would be looking into it - because it would be INTERESTING and scientifically important regardless of whether it would be profitable.
Basic scientific research is done by publicly funded labs like ours. The results are freely communicated. Biotech companies use our results to make money (and rightly so) but in the end do very little basic research - because, as the article says, - it does not pay. However let us not get the two confused as our poor "science" writer did. The NIH funding model may not be perfect- for example there is probably too much emphasis on western diseases like cancer rather than third world problems like malaria - which sort of creeped into the article. And it is appalling that we have 10 versions of Viagra rather than cheaper generic chemotherapy alternatives but the blame for that does not lie with the lack of basic research but further down in the R and D food chain.
Lets face it, the OSS model has a lot of uses outside of developing software. This is something I think about alot. Any process that requires or can benefit by constant refinement from any interested party can shine using a similar development model.
Take for example a company based in hardware - any electronic product, tvs, steros, washing machines, whatever - opens up all specs, design docs, everything. Letting the public see how the machine works inside and out. Just like operating systems you're bound to have SOME people with expertise in the subject area who are interesting in improving the the companies implimentation purely for advancement of the technologies. While consumers like you and I may feel no direct benefit from this in itself, if their patents were available for all to use under similar conditions to GPL (Not BSD. BSD is a license to TAKE. GPL is a license to SHARE.) competition would benefit consumers.
It's not quite the same, I wouldn't be able to take those specs and make myself a free version of their product. I won't have half the equipment I need or the parts. Linux just requires source, compiler and a computer. I would probably get a cheaper product due to competition, Company would lower R&D costs and will have fresh minds pouring over their designs, pointing out flaws and general overall refinement over some CVS styled system.
Rambling... Time to hit da bong
Most pharmaceutical research relies on a combinatoric approach: create many variations of a substance then test each one in an array to see if it binds with known cellular structures, then test those that bind for useful properties. Nature produces complex substances that have scarcely been catalogued, but a "lab on a chip" microarray could make it possible for large scale screening by ordinary people, testing soil microbes in their backyards. (Microbes that might be indegenous to that backyard and nowhere else in the world.) The array would simply have to indicate a positive hit, not decipher the entire chemistry of the active agent--that would be done at pharmaceutical headquarters. Such a method would employ the distibution of workload that makes Open Source work, would be practical and inexpensive, and could even make money for microbe prospectors, if there were some mechanism for profit sharing on derivative medicinals.
Then you could write all the code you wanted, but in order to run the compiler (or interpreter) even once you had to pay a million dollars. If your program generated compiler errors and you needed to run it again after fixing your code you would need to pay another million dollars for the compiler run.
Still think that open source would exist in this world?
What people posting to this thread seem to ignore is that fact that it is easy to come up with a good idea in biology and hiddeously expensive to turn a good idea into a useful treatment. These costs are not going to go away because people tend to care a great deal about what medical treatments are conducted on fellow human beings. This concern manifests itself in length regulations and review processes that turn any clinical trial into a multi-million dollar expense that might not lead to a working treatment.
Software is easy and the capital cost for its production is very low. Biotech is the exact opposite.
I wouldn't say all along. America has been capitalist for most of its history, IMHO. But yes, there is definitely a small gradual trend towards socialism these days (ignoring the current buffoons in power). But I think this is a natural trend in all the rich countries. First y'all go thru a phase of hard-core intense capitalism and then when you've finally started reaching a certain level of wealth, the upper crust starts giving back to society, even if it is a trickle. But I think starting out socialist is a BAAAAAD idea for any new nation - i.e. India. It started out socialist and is NOW moving to the fre-market. Try breaking the entrenched attitude that the Government is there to do everything for you, and that you must accept what is given. The one thing that a capitalist economy will give its citizens is a good work ethic - i.e. work hard, and only deal with the govt. when things go wrong. But in socialist countries, people develop a dependent mindset, and this totally screws you over. "If you give a man a fish, he doesn't go hungry today. If you teach a man to fish, he never goes hungry..."
My Favourite Meme
If every single bug found in Linux since it's creation could be considered a harmful, or even fatal, side-effect, how many people would have died in the clinical trials of Linux? Of course, those clinical trials would have been carried out on free, open-source test volunteers... or would it be on free mice from the open-source mice ranchers? Not to mention all the chemicals needed to actually produce the drugs... which would of course come from the open-source chemical engineers! How many people would actually contribute to open-source if every time they compiled their code, a megabyte of RAM disappeared from their computers?
But the GNU/aspirin won't work right because it will have been forked hundreds of times.
That's OK. Everyone will be real happy with it because it's FREE and comes in many colors.
A few unfortunates will die from taking GNU/aspirin - that's OK because they didn't RTFM.
Sounds similar to the discredited [*cough -- Reagan *] idea of giving unencumbered federal research grants for universities to develop exploitable ideas for the common good?
I think that the primary difference here is that contributors to open source software projects are often developers working on these projects in their spare time. Biotechnology, unfortunately, involves expensive equipment. Unless they've just got electron microscopes and mass spectromoters and atomic scales laying around, I don't think the model is applicable.
This is already happening. Behold PLOS Biology, the Biology journal of the Public Library of Science. This has been around for some years and was started up by Michael Eisen of the Eisen lab at Lawrence Berkeley. As Slashdot history will attest, I found the original introduction of the PLOS to be insipiring and in fact it led me to take up my current career in natural language processing (because someone has to search through all that science!). I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Eisen at a presentation he made at VANBUG recently, and he was very enthusiastic about hearing that NLP people are interested in working on searching and managing open science information, so I again urge you to help out projects like the PLOS (not just Biology, although that's the only current journal).
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
Fortunately, it won't be very difficult at all to convince the local teens that your home-engineered ultraweed and hypercrack are worth a month's allowance.
On a more serious note though, although the research itself may be cost/circumstance prohibitive, I can see potential in open-source projects for producing tools for data analysis and potentially for the analysis of public domain data itself. The projects being open sourced don't necessarily need to be the *source* of the data, y'know.
I think you underestimate the effort involved in "monitoring" a trial. Most trials have at least one dedicated statistician working with the clinical researchers to make sure that the results are analyzed properly - just on this basis, I think that "tens of thousands" of statisticians, or even an even thousand, assuming they can each work on ten current trials at once, would be required to continuously update the trial results - hardly a low-cost center...
Speaking of hardware, I once read about a project to design a RISC processor in an "open source" manner, where the only cost incurred would be in manufacturing the darn thing. I don't know where that ended up, but if it disappeared, that's a real shame. I think it would be awesome if a community of hardware hackers could put together an entire hardware specification that doesn't need to be burdened with all the backwards compatibility crap that commercial stuff must adhere to, and I could see that becoming an integral part of the projects to make free operating systems and other components. Who knows... But yes, open source will probably expand to other areas of business. It probably won't happen overnight, but it will happen...
As long as we're plugging stuff, here's my shameless plug for my little (100% commercial, NOT open source) software company that makes affordable reagent management software for Life Sciences labs.
benchKeeper
In a market where Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) software generally costs $50k and more, we're a drop in the bucket at an entry price of $2k.
While we're not open source, or free (we have developers and infrastructure to pay for, but the principals don't take a salary), we are trying to provide a software option to the small, under-funded labs that will help them do their job. You would be AMAZED at just how archaic some of the labs are when it comes to information management... in most cases, it's ALL paper-based. 3-ring binders for Cryo storage tracking, etc.
We're Canadian, so anyone in Bio Tech will probably know just how incredibly under-funded CDN labs are. That's where we learned our trade, and that's how we're trying to give back. (We also offer a 60% discount to educational institutions)
$0.02 (CDN)
I always thought of the way science has been done for the last two hundred years as being "open source." All science is currently available in journals and anyone can use the information in the journals as long as proper credit is given. So what is this article trying to say? We should keep doing things the way we have been?
The talk was his acceptance speech for the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award at the BioIT-World conference.
The award was presented by bioinformatics.org. In his speech Lincoln talked about essentially open sourcing the R&D process and leaving the manufacturing and distribution to big Pharma. Thus, in theory, allowing academic R&D to push new drugs towards current public health concerns versus the money making drugs big Pharma produces now.
Not likely to happen but interesting to think about.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail...
I'm writing this from the biotech company I am interning at this summer and everyone here knows full well that personalized medicine, genomics, and all that are not understood. We know almost *nothing*. When pharma and biotech companies "develop" drugs, they generate thousands of compounds and slowly eliminate one by one in hope that in the end, they *might* end up with one single effective compound. And then, they do studies on that compound in an attempt to figure out how it works. And guess what? We *still* don't know! We can make educated guesses based upon our data and experiments, but that's all they are... guesses.
In addition, open source software is successful because you only need your brain, knowledge of programming, internet access, and a computer ($500+ nowadays) to contribute.
To do research? Well, a good mass spectrometer goes for nearly $1 million today. High throughput, fast PCR machines... oh about $4000... Pipettes need calibration at least once a year... gotta pay the tech who does that work. A micropipetter costs about $100 per pipette. To do genetics research, you need a 2uL, a 20uL, a 200uL and a 1000uL -- at *least* that. To avoid contamination you need at least one extra set for dealing with samples. That comes to oh... $800. Then, pipettes must be sterilized which means an autoclave. Add $2000 or so. Pipette tips are disposal because it's impossible to avoid contamination otherwise. Each box (must be sterile, DNAse and RNAse free) costs $30+. A single scientist working in a lab can go through two boxes or more PER DAY.
Open source biotech? Give me a break.
--- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." ~ Ben Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
I have links to many sources for amateurs to become involved in (peaceful) genetic engineering at DNAhack.com.
For example, there are Web sites where you can type in a list of DNA bases, and in a few days either get your custom DNA snippets (aka oligonucleotides), or even get the DNA delivered inside bacterial plasmids (aka custom genes). With custom genes, it is a simple kitched-top operation using heat shock to insert the custom genes into strains of research E. Coli.
OK...when I think about this matter there are some parallels between computer/network technology development and the discovery/reinvention of biotech.
/. etc, we together study what is out there, just beyond the reach of any one. As through a glass, darkly.
1) Both fields began as, and largely remain, academic pursuits;
2) Both deal with systems of enormous complexity that exhibit emergent properties;
3) Both focus on the macro-scale, visible results of the interactions of a huge number of microscopic, essentially invisible, components.
I could go on. But you get the point.
Single companies, and single individuals (aside from a few rare geniuses) do not adequately deal with systems having such characteristics as those just listed. It is all simply too big, too fragmented and too obscure for one human mind to either anticipate or encompass all at once. Advances in these fields *emerge* from the shared thoughts of countless individuals, often over hundreds of years. Via writing, speaking, teaching, email, chat,
Here is the real danger; we allow commercial enterprises to dominate the field of [network technology | biotech ] and to allow their narrow, myopic view of the subject, driven by greed of possession and control, to lock humanity out from the only means of adequate study, which is collective. If that happens, then we will for a long time content ourselves to nibble around the edges of [network technology | biotech] waiting for some greater genius to pull away from the throng and raise up our eyes to what is really possible, which if we are unfortunate may never even happen. It is not all about money. Sometimes it is about doing the right thing for the greater good. And generally doing the right thing means sharing, even though you stand to give up control. [Network technology | Biotech] has great potential, but that potential will be realized and acted upon by all of us, together, freely, and with knowledge of our personal responsibility to contribute to the progress of our kind. All great things have become great in this way, all triffling things have become forgotten because the majority of humanity did not participate. What is open is shared and what is shared is preserved and built upon. All else vanishes into nothing and is lost.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Yeesh, take a microbiology class.
The cat has been out of the bag for a very long time as far as making your own killer microbe. Hell, you can order kits to teach kids how to grow thier own antibiotic resistant germs, all you need is an incubator (or anything (can you say old oven) that you can hold a steady temp at). Publishing this sort of this would do no harm, and would significantly speed up drug research, and drastically lower prices. In any event the very huigh end stuff you need for gene sequencing is already tightly control, so no, Osama aint going to be making a "super anti-Satan" germ anytime soon.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
In the next 25 to 50 years (not a long time, if you consider historical timelines), the advances in nanotechnology and biotechnology (boosted by the open source model), will probably allow for the average person to be as smart and tallented as any "natural" tallented person today (sports and intellectual pursuits plus body mods (fur anybody?, that would be cool, just make sure you live in a cold climate first..) through brain interfaces that would allow an ordinairy person to aquire years on univerisy eduation/other people's life experinces through having a brain cybernetic nanotechnolgy interface. If this does happen, we will no longer have the concept of "elite" persons ruling over us, as anybody can become really smart and/or super athelete. Hopefully, money and personal material "stuff" will be easily obtain/recycled and rich people like Bill Gates will become an achronism and not rull over us anymore!! (cool!) Of course, we will need the open source model to do this and, also, like the chicken and the egg problem, you will need the establishment of nano/biotech to allow people to be able to easily mod themselves both brain wise and for personal looks too, and by this I mean that the first people to do this will need those 4 to 25 years of higher education to be able to pull off this technology, but with open source model, this technology will spread around to the average person who can then do any mods themselves, one word of caution, the future modder had probablly should have a lot of "data" like android/surgons robots (both local and remote internet access) around (with advanced nano-grown hospital facillties, state of the art, of course) with nano back-up images of what you looked like before the mod if anything went wrong, you would want to be sucessfully restored!
These machines are expensive in part because of the limit numbers produced. If there was more demand for the machines, then the companies producing them would be able to lower margins by taking advantage of mass production techniques.
"It takes freaking forever"
Time will always be a factor, but think about the time savings if suddenly hundreds of scientists were collaborating trying to see if a certain molecule would bond with the aids virus.
"funding"
Just because ideas are shared does not mean that the drugs produced will cost consumers no money. There will still be plenty of money to make off the actual sale of the product. After all, it is common knowledge how to make donuts, but lots of companies do it and make good money doing it.
Also consider another important aspect of drug research, the risk. Companies stand to lose a massive amount of money if something fails trials or turns out not to work well. If you have a lot more people working on something, you spread out the risk considerably.
As far as clinical trials go, the government can simply grant limited production rights to the company that puts up the cash to get something through trials. Once the money is made back with a certain % profit, the game is opened and they have to compete with everyone else. Except they will already have a huge branding advantage.
Unlike software that can be distributed for free (or very nearly so) how would the drugs be produced? let's say we open source the project, creat a new drug from scratch, and get it ready for trials. Who pays for the production facilities to MAKE the drug? The salaries of the researchers to TEST the drug? The inevitable lawsuits that arise from fucking up and making a really bad drug?
You see, the problem with this in not the amount of technical knowledge involved, but the material cost. You will never have any process that actually produces a useful drug without having resources to produce, test, and deal with the consequences.
Also, if 800,000 unrelated numbskulls make a drug that I end up getting, who do I go after if it ends up causing cancer/infertility/flipper babies?
Open source in not the answer to everything.
Your nervous system is no longer responding, you can wait to see if it starts to respond or re-boot and loose all unsaved information.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Ha! Used thermocyclers are NOT 10k, and you damned well can set up a sequencing lab in your basement. The sequencer would however set you back a fair bit though.
I do sequencing for a living, and I make the oligos we use to do it, as well as keep the lab stocked and running.
If you're trying to come up with an argument agains "open source bioinformatics," you're gonna need another example.
BioJava
Get a job you god damn open source hippies. I'd like to see you guys invent something really good and make it "open source"!!! Give it all away for free, we'll make money off of the support. Lets make everything free and, we'll all hold hands and sing songs, and we'll all live off of the land! It will be swell.
- The (food/software) itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle treadmill
- The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
- they have all or nothing security models
- They break standards.
- they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures.
But as others have pointed out, software development isn't as expensive as biotech / pharma development. On the other hand, the potential cost to human lives of closed vs. open source development for biotech is also huge. We should be talking about it at least as much as we talk about SCO.For example, look at trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500k/year, kills 100k/year, drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment (Melarsoprol) contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream . So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. The analogy to software can still be made: when Microsoft discontinues support for a product, people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. When Aventis discontinues support for a product, people suffer as well. It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type.
Brings new meaning to viral licensing
That organization is an industrial / academic policy think tank and so I described open source, different uses of it, and suggested use of the GPL-like liscenses for research in bio/nanotechnology.
I covered most of the objections stated in this thread but also noted an online talk by agricultural biotech people from around the world that was very interesting. Third world agriculture has been attacked by unethical corporations like Monsanto which use a suffocating mixture of intellectual property and biotechnology to make it impossible to develop without them, forever. These stakeholders suggested something like Open Source Life Sciences.
However I also noted that while proteomics and discovery of pathways has until now been research given as a freebie to drug companies, at least in Japan it has been recognized that new legislation is necessary to enable development in these areas based on something like a patent.
Nanotech (as the general public imagines it) however requires a far greater amount of basic research being farther away from becoming a product (of course it already is in lots of products, I am talking about machinery etc.) and so could benefit more from a GPL.
The biggest drawback besides how to fund development and coordinate with commercial ventures is of course security a la Bill Joy ("some things we shouldn't make; we should monitor scientists"). And I have nothing against capitalism, I am simply interested in how to improve communication among scientists and use the Net to speed development. If money is what does it fine.
But there seemed to me a number of interesting fields in which the open source / GPL paradigm could be useful and provide effective advantages especially for commercially disadvantaged participants.
The cost of subscriptions to scientific journals are immense and foolish - even from the standpoint of someone who get free access from their institution. I'm often tempted to just give out passwords willy-nilly to anyone who needs them. It strikes me that the majority of publications in my field are owned by a very small number of companies who are not at all inclined to be competitive.
That said, after my free paper subscription to PLOS biology ended, I haven't really looked at the site since. I guess the first few faltering steps have to be taken before it becomes more established and I automatically check it out every month like I look at the Cell/JBC/MCB/Nature/Science/EMBO/PNAS crowd.
What's the difference between Capitalism and Communism?
Under Capitalism, man exploits his fellow man. Under Communism, it's the other way around.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
- free food
- science
it is sometimes hard to remember the larger-scale ends and means.Thanks on the username. I'm a total geek, what can I say. Used to run 2D gels with chloroquine in them; now, my little sister is in Africa doing cost benefit analysis on that new malaria drug. Funny how the world seems to be small.
Google around for some of the more bio/tech savvy Universities and you'll see what I mean.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...