Slashdot Mirror
Google Accused of Bio-piracy
Simon Phillips writes "ZDNet is reporting
that Google has been accused of being the 'biggest
threat to genetic privacy' this year for its plan to create a searchable database of genetic information. From the article: 'Google was presented with an award as part of the Captain
Hook Awards for Biopiracy in Curitiba, Brazil, this week. The organisers allege that Google's collaboration with genomic research institute J. Craig Venter to create a searchable online database of all the genes on the planet is a clear example of biopiracy.'"
So. Google is monopolizing genetic resources by putting genetic information online for free?
I was thinking the same thing. If Google is putting this information online for all to use in research, how is that a bad thing?
As a computer scientist who has been working in bioinformatics for over 3 years now, I've been calling for the "googlification" of genomics information ever since I discovered what a mess the community really is. You would not believe how many different databases, with different indexing systems there are out there. To actually do any useful research you first have to spend a month or two trying to make the pieces of data fit together.
Our lab, and many other labs, actually have entire projects dedicated to finding ways to piece these disjoint datasets together for effective quering. This is a huge under-addressed problem in genomics.
And genomic data goes far beyond just the human genome, that's only one small part. If someone could organize all the genomic formation across all the hundreds of genomes which have been sequenced, it would be a very very useful tool. The other half of the problem in genomics databases is half of them are NOT free and available for researchers without paying licensing fees. And to me, a far better use of research dollars is on actual research rather then paying licensing fees for data which was probably originally discovered with public research dollars to begin with. So if Google can open up all this sequence information, and more importantly the related information downstream from just the raw sequences such as pathway information, all the more power to them!
The truth is most genomes ARE already available through sites like NCBI, you can download hundreds of eukaryotic, prokaryotic, and fungi genomes freely already. You can already find similarities between sequences across species through tools such as BLAST, or find orthologs across species with tools such as Ortholuge. I would assume what Google is doing is creating a better way to organize this. And Dr. Venter is already known for trying to find as many diverse genomic sequences as he can, and usually not human ones.
This definitely seems to be panic over nothing, over something which could help genomic research a lot, and ultimately find better ways to protect humans against the nasty bugs out there.
I for one welcome our new Google overlords.