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."

Comments

Weber - Success of Open Source

[JoshuaDFranklin]

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.

Check out bioinformatics.org...

[tcopeland]

....i.e., right here. Looks sort of GForge-ish, although with frames and a custom theme and such-like...

also neuroinformatics

[drfireman]

The Human Brain project funds neuroinformatics projects, many of which are released under free or open source licenses.

So let me make sure I have this right...

[TheHonestTruth]

You're saying a few good drug manufacturers, some of the best in the world, could make the drugs. And then people that know nothing about medication, or don't want to be involved in the drug creation process, could then use the drugs free of charge or mix the drugs as they see fit?

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

Re:I am all for this

[sTalking_Goat]

If biotech becomes really easy for consumers to use/create, similar to the manner of open source software, I think something like this could put a lot of power into the hands of the people.

I don't see this happeneding. I work in Biotech. The cost of instrumentation alone is astounding. Its not like you can go out and setup a sequencing lab in your basement. An older model used Thermocycler will cost at least 10K, and thats on the low end of the instrumentataion scale. Even if you scratch build equipment yourself (which I've done) its still going to cost you, and try convincing peer reveiw or god forbid, Mr. FDA that your findings on non-validated equipment is worth anything...

I'm all for open source but I don't see it getting very far in high-end Biotech.

Time to plug PLOS Biology

[Xofer D]

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).