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Open Source Biology Initiative
Nick dos Remedios writes "The Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) initiative aims to make biological technology more readily available to biologists everywhere. The latest genetics and biology tools should be freely available to researchers over the internet, but instead access is typically restricted by commercial patents and prohibitive licensing fees. BIOS and its associated BioForge aims to overcome these restrictions to innovation by encouraging companies and public sector research organizations to contribute their research tools and technologies to the BioForge repository. In return, users of the technology are bound by an open source license to share all improvements with the original inventors and other license holders."
...lots of those out there already; more on GForge here.
Splitting up the project load makes sense to me; that way one site - SourceForge - doesn't have to bear the full load. Also, it lets folks do custom things to make their site more useful - like Graal.
The Army reading list
Typically for academic institutions, you publish all of your techniques including changes that you made to the protocol to get your results. This, and the willingness to share and explain your approach, is called good science.
The problem comes when you try to open up approaches done by commercial companies. Many of these companies spent years putting together the kits that they sell. Only the restrictive licensing and patents allow them to fully recoup their losses.
Take Amaxa for example. They supply an electroporation kit that works wonders for expressing constructs in cells. Unfortunately each kit costs $300 for 25 transfections. My lab typically goes through 3 of these every 2.5 weeks. Now if Amaxa would just tell us what the composition of the buffers are, that is all that I need to put together my own electroporation system and save my lab at least 15k a year! As a downside, Amaxa would cease to exist. What would be the point of having a biotech company that develops new techniques? Selling support? Please.
This is a really nice idea. The problem is that all this research costs money and a lot of it is being done by publicly owned companies. A publicly owned company has an obligation to its stockholders to make profit and generally to maximize that profit.
That's not just someone's idea, but that's actually the law.
So, this research costs money and it's being done by companies that are obligated to make a profit off of this research they've paid for. So, they sell the results of that research for insanely large amounts of money.
Now, we say, "that's just insanely priced," but in economic terms, that's "what the market will bear," which in layman's terms means that enough people are willing to pay that "insane price" that it's worth it to keep it at that price.
This all follows very standard formulas that apply to most industries, not just drug companies. So, we sit around and talk about the evil of the drug companies, but the fact is, they're just doing their job as the law specifies.
I have no problem with us changing the law, but it's kind of like changing the rules of the game after the game has started. All the players hurt by the new rules cry foul, for obvious reasons.
There's also a branch of creative commons formed to work on this.
Science Commons
They're more focused on 1. supporting open access to scientific literature, especially taxpayer-funded literature and 2. building licenses and modular contracts that allow companies and universities to waive some IP rights when it makes sense (such as, if we know we aren't going to make money on a gene patent and you could use it to cure tuberculosis, good on ya, but if you want to use it to make a viagra competitor, we get a piece...so to speak).
The cost of sequencing and data analysis is actually quite low, and all publically funded (NSF/NIH) data should be made available to the public.
The best way to make sure that this data remains open source is to increase funding to national granting agencies like the National Science Foundation and the NIH.
"Asleep at the switch? I wasn't asleep, I was drunk!" -- Homer
This may get more resistance from the schools than the private sectors. All universities make you sign away EVERY possible disovery you make, as a student or professor, and they are more inflexible about this than many companies. Mike Eisen told me that he imbeds GPL code into his code so that it cannot be exclusively owned by UC. Universities have realized the cash cow biotech really is. Look at university of Madison wisconsin. They still make money on "vitamin D milk".
While some things take 12-15 years, many do not. Look at the first version of aids drugs. They used 3-5 di-DNA to terminate the DNA and prevent rna->dna reverse-transcription. The entire idea was from sanger, nicholson sequencing. In 1981, I was doing sequencing of VEE (and other virus) dominatly using this approach. In '83, when the first drugs came on line, it was simply the chain terminator. There was no R. Yet a patent was granted. How much money was spent? very little.
As to the costs, well, just because money is spent does not mean that is what it costs. It is no different than what happens with Musicians and Movies. Few labels have a Movie or Musicians that make a profit. Yet, for some odd reasons the labels make outlandish profits. Same thing with Pharmaceutical companies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Use the Power of Google. Also,I believe Debian has been used on NASA space shuttles before now and they use their own version of GNU/Linux a lot.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
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