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.'"
Gnetics?
OK, if theres piracy going on, wheres the torrent stream?
liqbase
There are much better things to go after google for if you don't like them (*cough*censorhip*in*China*France*Germany*US*Unwa
The monopolization of genetic information is a serious issue - people are trying to do stupid things - like attempting to apply copy protection measures (both physical and legal) to life. Life attempts to copy itself & tradional copyright / patent laws should not apply.
Unfortunately, these awards look like shameless self-promotion rather then a serious attempt to tackle the problem.
My pics.
I can understand the meaning of pirate as in someone who sails the seas and acts in piracy - stealing others' belongs by force.
I recognise the notion of piracy as in copying material which has been copyrighted, conducted by a 'pirate'. But I prefer the term copyright infringement.
But what the heck is 'Bio-piracy'? Because privacy and piracy sound vaguely familiar isn't reason enough, IMHO. Naming the awards 'the Captain Hook awards' seems even more facetious.
From TFA, "Google, in cooperation with Craig Venter, are developing plans to make all of our genomes Googlable to facilitate the brave new world of private genetically-tailored medicines" does not equal piracy, IMHO.
And to tackle their argument, they have not outlined why genetically tailored medicines are bad, not why holding them in private hands is wrong. And private means exactly what? The copyright to GNU/Linux is held in private hands. And Google giving public access to work done by the human genome sequence project seems a lot better than letting all research in the hands of a very small amount of drug companies, those that are most interested in profiting from keeping information 'secret'.
Biopiracy? doesn't that imply theft? how are they getting this genetic material? O.o
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
The information is being put out for "free." (advertiser supported). But wouldn't this actually be a boon for research scientists? Better searches than BLAST maybe?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you are someone with the resources to even do anything with this type of information, you will most likely be able to obtain it through sources other than Google.
This guy's the limit!
Google is monopolizing genetic resources by putting genetic information online for free?
Sounds to me like these guys are a bunch of kooks who are attacking any large company who uses the words "genetic" and "database" in the same sentence.
Google is one of the biggest, so they automatically attack.
Are these guys worried about genes of individual people being searched, or privately owned, corperate made|discovered genes?
If it is the latter, I don't see a problem.
Technoli
Why is it that when a company makes information private, they are considered greedy and secretive, but when a company makes information freely accessible over the internet, they are considered pirates?
Register the editry.
I guess they're after some Yarrr-NA.
:)
Ouch, sorry about that
We're gonna need the BioNinjas and BioZombies to come kick Google's @$$.
Making data publicly available at no charge is evil and advancing the privatisation of genetic data. That makes sense. Torvalds, Cox and Stallman must be evil for all that Free software. The Gutenberg Project must be pure evil for making all that literature publicly available - who knows what Evil Corporations(TM) might do with that information? Seems to me that this 'bio-piracy' malarkey is a thinly veiled primitivist agenda.
This made me spit out my coffee... Arrrrg!
There's a balance between communication and proliferation. There really is.
If a person is being tested for a degree on material, they shouldn't have access to the answers. But if a person is working in the field, they *should*. And if a person is curious, they probably should too.
This is just taking it too far. There may be justifiable reasons why evil corperation X in country Z shouldn't have access to information Gamma, but what real difference will it make if they can google for it. There's a much greater chance of them screwing something up if they're evil than getting something right.
Weight that against the 1000's of corperations/individuals/research groups also looking at information Gamma and doing something promising, and google is, on average, doing a good service.
I have to google for facts that make our research institute run literally daily. Usually its simple stuff like " what the hell is bentonite and how much can we put in this beaker without breaking something." or "what the heck is this photoflo stuff. It works great for this demonstration experiment, but we can't find the bottle..." a short google later, and we have a home brew wetting agent made, in the tank, and making the flow over a glass edge laminar just as we wanted.
Biopiracy? Please: Communication is a *vital* part of the scientific method. Shure, 1/1000 it might bite someone in the ass. But without modern communication pathways, we wouldn't have all these cool toys or long lives in which to buy more toys.
-=fshalor
Best explanation I could think of as well.
I read this and said WTF?
then I read teh story and said WTF?
then I read your comment and said Ahhh!
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I mean really though. If I were them I would be welcoming Google.
:P. Like they just sat around playing with cats and never leanred anything, rofl.
Increased interest in a project such as the Genome project would help, correct? And what is there to steal really? And who is going to care... I highly doubt that the kind of people who would download part of the Genome project and the people who download movies illegal are anywhere near the same breed. Sometimes I think people are just picking on Google, hehe. Google is simply going for their mission statement I suppose... I think it would be pretty crazy to have a public database of all of this shit. Haha, maybe the scientists don't really have anything anyways, and are doing this to cover it up
and yes, "bio-piracy" sounds like possibly the dumbest term to ever be filed against Google.
...
One day, I won't be allowed to take a dump 'cause I forgot to renew the license to use my biological disposal unit.
Don't answer me. Moderate. Slashdot is about moderation, not discussion.
There are billions of years of prior art. And the argument that know one would research them otherwise is crap to... First to market in the drug world is the driving force. Even if... does that mean people can patent translated segments of ancient languages if they read them first? These people should cram grapes in their noses!
Huh...and I thought patenting genes (including ones the appear in MY body) was the real example of biopiracy.
What Google is planning certainly isn't going to stifle innovation like gene patents will--for if lack of patents ever harmed research governments can and would supply funds for researchers.
Looks like one of the April fools stories slipped in a bit early.
People leave their DNA and finger prints wherever they go, and the law is clear that whatever you leave behind is up for grabs. Where is the piracy in making an online searchable database of public-domain information?
You run your research lab based on facts from Google?
The first thing you learn, is the internet is not a reliable source of research information. Have fun on the day you do that google for how much bentonite to put into the beaker, and find out the paper you got it from on the internet was only a draft, not peer reviewed, and had a decimal point in the wrong place.
This has got to be P.R. hooha. Somebody said: "How can we get some free P.R.? Lets attack somebody huge, pretend we are oppressed and maybe end up on slashdot..."
... from which many ethical and legal issues can and do arise.
Thank God For Google. They seem to be one of the few companies that actually gets the fact that information wants to be free. On top of which, it's just absolutely absurd that ANYONE other than God can get a patent on genetic sequences. It kind of reminds me of that old joke, "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first make an apple." Anyone who can do that deserves to get the patent for the genetic sequence of an apple.
That's kind of like getting a patent for the number pi. That would actually be a good one. If you have the patent to the decimal sequence that makes up pi, you could really argue that you have a patent on everything, including every genetic sequence. Theoretically, pi will contain every conceivable sequence of digits somewhere in its infinitely long sequencey and thus, anything that can be encoded as a sequence of digits (movies, music, books, genes), can be found somewhere in pi. Therefore, the patent holder for pi is the patent holder for everything. QED.
The Human Genome Project was a collaborative effort, largely funded by government and public sources. The agencies involved in the research, however, seem to have a vested interest in keeping the data private, even going so far as to patent genetic sequences (isn't there "prior art" for all of my DNA? I call them "parents"). Freely available information, while often valuable, has no resale value. Can this be the true cause of The "Coalition Against Biopiracy" issueing what seems more like a political slander campaign than a genuine warning of wrongdoing?
Perhaps we should ask:
IPBN - Indigenous Peoples Biodiversity Network
P.O. Box 567
Cusco, Peru
Phone: +51 84 24-5021
email: ipbn@web.net
SEARICE - South East Asia Regional Inititiaves in Community Empowerment
Unit 331, Eagle Court Condominium
26 Matalino Street, Central District
Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines
Phone: (63 2) 433-7182, 433-2067
Fax: (63 2) 922-6710
email: searice@searice.org.ph
web: http://www.searice.org.ph/
ETC Group - Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration
431 Gilmour St, Second Floor,
Ottawa, ON Canada K2P 0R5
Tel: 1(613)241-2267
Fax: 1(613)241-2506
email: etc@etcgroup.org
web: http://www.etcgroup.org/
Quite simple. Because those genes are taken from natively Brazilian plants and animals, used abroad for research then patented. So, if a local small industry decides they want to use that plant for something (a native plant) they must pay royalties to a corporation from a FOREIGN COUNTRY, usually a country where such plants/animals don't exist.
That's what they classify as bio-piracy. Steal native elements from a country and patent them as a property of your corporation, then sell it back to that very country or charge for royalties.
In my pants.
[Apologies. Crude, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity.]
What do all these searchable charts have in common?
Periodic Table
Protien Family
Acidic/Alkalinity
Ionization Excitement
DNA strand markers
All are tools in which we make our stepping stones into a better or worse life for us and others (not always in that order).
If worsen quality of life can be had, then it becomes an issue of "scientific terrorism" and it should be controlled (however fluid it may be).
If it improves the quality of our life, then it is "scientific knowledge."
I'm ok with Bio-piracy of DNA until someone comes along and "worsen" things for humanity. Take "target DNA elimination" for example. Can anyone say bio-ethnic cleansing and getting rid of cancer-causing cells in the same sentence, yet?
This was a good response, thought you shouldn't have posted as AC. And the mod shouldn't have modded ya down.
/.'eans persist in attacking comments which aren't fully explained. I seem to be plauged with it.
... I couldn't believe they had the students cutting the power on before they had the cooling water flowing. (Even though it states clearly in the manual that the water should be checked before the power is turned on.)
Why do
There is a *lot* of information you can get from reading any single article, website, response, etc. But any engineer worth his/her degree would *never* rely on one source. Even stuff you see in peer reviewed articles can be wrong. (I've seen it!)
However, there is something to be learned even from the wrong article. Sure, I didn't go into this in my comment. I'm sorry I assumed that my point would come across without an explanation.
An example:
Looking up laser howtos the other day for revitalizing our laser lab. Was googleing for hints and docs about a few Spectra Physics argon ion lasers. (Series 2000 and a Stabilitte 2011). One of the first startup procedures I found for the 2000 was from a college graduate student physics lab.
I had to ignore the startup (and shut down too, since that was even worse.) but the howto had one of the clearest tuning procedures I've seen for getting a dummy to safely align the laser.
Should I condem google for providing me with a howto that could result in an incident if there was a water leak? No. I could only blame myself for being stupid.
-=fshalor
Well,here's the deal. There is a situation on the ground, and there are the causes and principles.
The situation on the group is that Genetically Manipulated stocks are appearing on the market. Point 1) some people have a fear of genes as part of Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know.
Genetics have great promise: GM foods they can produce high yields, resist pests, drouts, all kinds of things. They could greatly relieve world hunger and all kinds of other stuff.
Point 2) in spite of great promise, we have a patent system in effect here. Companies are scouring the world for certain genetic traits in plants, then patenting them and reselling them. They then "manage their rights" by engineering sterile seeds, or milling the seeds before they provide them to famine-struck regions. So your dirt-poor third world farmer suddenly sees his plants being used, the genes being taken, then sold back in a "BRM-d form" so that the big drunk companies get rich.
Genetic testing can improve people's lives: ask anyone who's had a cancer identified via a mutation; Likewise Genetic therapy.
Point 3) Sure they can save lives, but the human genomes are being patented, and people are making money off of our inherent makeup.
Point 4) Only rich companies and individuals have the means to play with genes this way. So by google putting this information out, they are favoring the exploitation of the poor by the rich.
That's the thought underlying it as near as I can make out: it's a combination of irrational fear of the unknown, outrage at shameless exploitation committed in the name of being humanitarian, perfectly reasonable resistance to the closed nature of information, and populist distrust of the motives of the rich and powerful.
google falls into categories one and four more than two and three, which is why most researchers are confused by the ranking. To the other side, the exploitation and privatization of common goods is part and parcel of the capitalist system.
Personally, I'm in favor of mapping all the genes out. And I've got a lovely mutation I'd love to get rid of.
I think they definitely attacked Google on this for publicity purposes, after all we wouldn't be discussing "biopiracy" if Google hadn't won. But if you review their list, most of their claims of biopiracy seem pretty valid. They're referring to companies and individuals commiting legal acts of piracy: taking genetic material, in some cases cultivated for thousands of years by indigenous peoples, and claiming it for their own. It turns the piracy model of copyright infringement on its head and accuses the rights-owners of stealing from the users. Is it it publicity stunt? Yes. Does Google belong on this list? Maybe not. But it got me interested in a dangerous trend...
I can see the logic behind the people that handed out the award. Google sort of automates part of the process of finding useful genes in the huge database. By doing this, they indeed allow some companies access to information that could lead to a patent based on this genetic information. Where the argument has any teeth at all is the fact that putting this info online does nothing for the native people from whom the information was originally taken. Most of these people 1)have no computer or internet access 2)even if they did wouldn't have the equipment or training to be able to do anything with the raw genetic data and 3)wouldn't have the legal pull or capital required to actually patent the information.
And yes, "biopiracy" is actually a real problem. Basically, researchers come in to fairly indigenous areas and ask the shamans/etc about local plants used in traditional remedies. They then bring these back and analyze them to find which, if any, of the compounds are effecting the cure. The company they work for then takes out a patent on the compound, figures out a method to mass produce it, run through standard FDA tests then start selling the chenical in little pills. The problem comes when the company turns around and sues the natives for violating their patents by using the compound in their traditional remedies... even though the natives have been doing this for generations and generations (3rd world lawyers aren't all that up on their IP law, and often the drug corps are more powerful than the country the natives reside in.) So, these people are now left without a cure for some disease or ailment, and have nowhere near enough money to pay for the pills that contain the compound they used to be able to get for free from the forest or swamp.
Why would the drug corps do something so blatantly evil? It's not that they want these people to go without treatment, it's that they don't want people who are already buying their products to switch to the natural form. If the plant/fungus/whatever is already well known and easilly grown in large parts of the area, then the drug corps take different measures to reduce access: drug laws. Marijuana and Opium do have some medical uses, but growing the plants in your backyard does not give the drug corps money, so the government will not and does not recognize those uses. So it becomes illegal to grow marijuana in your backyard. Even more insidious, poppy flowers are perfectly legal to grow unless it can be proven that you know how to make a drug out of them (I'll ruin it for you all: split open a seed pod, boil in water, drink. Not as labor intensive as americans have been led to believe. Also, it can be done just as effectively with any variety of poppy: the idea that certain opium poppies which only grow in particular climates such as afghanistan are a red herring thown out to prevent people from figuring out how to make their own drugs, whether recreational or pharmaceutical.)
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Why use the word "steal" here, though? Are these organisms being smuggled out of the country, or at they being legitimately and legally removed for study? If the latter, anyone accusing them of theft (or piracy) is just rabble-rousing. There may be some legitimate cause for concern regarding local economies, here, but neither piracy nor theft is occurring. And tarring Google with this is doubly asinine.
This makes the whole assertion even more stupid, since no country/ethnic group/publicity-seeking self-proclaimed human-rights experts can claim to own or control or have rights to that pool of DNA.
It is a very odd stunt indeed. But I guess there is an appreciating audience for this stuff too.
Reality or nothing.
The Captain Hook Award to Google in the category of "worst threat to genetic privacy," has attracted some strong reaction. A few people have written in Google's defense, claiming that Google isn't a biopirate and that the Coalition Against Biopiracy is wrong to name them. They argue that it isn't biopiracy because Google will not be patenting the genomic information they will be storing -- and, since anyone can access the information, its not monopolistic. They point out that this approach is actually anti-monopolistic because the genomic information would be freely available to everyone. And if genomic information is easily available, Google's defenders point out, it is more likely to facilitate the discovery of cures and new medical breakthroughs.
Here's our response:
First, the award wasn't for 'biopiracy' it was specifically for posing a 'threat to genetic privacy'. Even if Google makes all the genomic data it holds anonymous -- it is still possible to identify an individual's data by genetic fingerprinting. On Google Video, Google has a video of an internal talk on genomic databases where the speaker admits this is a big potential problem, and a troubling issue that Google is going to face in the future.
But whether or not genomic information is available for free or not is not the point - the important point is that it would facilitate access without consent. When you download a document from the internet (via Google) you have the implied consent of the person who posted it to that public space that it is now for common use - this is enough because this is only data and not much more - it is not as personal as an individual's genomic information. By contrast when you access somebody's genomic data you need to have explicit consent because this is something very personal that has an important bearing on their identity, health, right-to-privacy, personhood etc. Access to an individual's genomic information -- in the wrong hands -- opens up possibilities of discrimination in the workplace, for example. If Google makes all personal genomic data available for anyone to use it is also making that available to profit-making enterprises -- and it's not clear how they could put in place an adequate consent mechanism to do this. This data is not Google's to redistribute (and it shouldn't even be Craig Venter's). It is also misleading to think that this data is going to be freely and equally available to everyone, because only certain specialized knowledge enterprises have the ability to make use of such data, and, by and large they are private, for-profit and they won't re-distribute a penny back to the people whose genomic information they are using. Genomic information is not like software code and it's wrong to compare them -- it belongs very personally to individuals. When you use or distribute that information without explicit consent, there is a victim. The 2005 Captain Hook Award to Google is intended to raise questions and concerns about a future threat to genetic privacy. We believe these issues need public attention and should be widely debated to forestall the most dangerous and socially harmful scenarios.
The Coalition Against Biopiracy also received a few complaints about naming Craig Venter as a recipient of one of this year's Captain Hook Awards. We believe he's quite deserving. Go here for more background on Venter's 2004 global expedition to collect microbial biodiversity:
http://www.etcgroup.org/article.asp?newsid=442
http://www.etcgroup.org/article.asp?newsid=473
Venter is the flamboyant scientist who first grabbed headlines back in 1991. While employed at NIH, part of the US government's Human Genome Project, when he filed for US patents on thousands of gene sequences from the human brain.
Venter's global expedition to collect microbial diversity challenges national sovereignty and raises more doubts about the already problematic acce