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Biology Goes Open Source
cford writes "According to Forbes some of the drug company giants are finally realizing that their genetic research is worth more if they give it away. 'Novartis, the Basel, Switzerland, drug giant, has helped uncover which of the 20,000 genes identified by the Human Genome Project are likely to be associated with diabetes. But rather than hoard this information, as drug firms have traditionally done, it is making it available for free on the World Wide Web. "It will take the entire world to interpret these data," says Novartis research head Mark Fishman. "We figure we will benefit more by having a lot of companies look at these data than by holding it secret."'"
Patents on the medical and biological industry, while potentially good for the companies, are truly terrible for the rest of the world. The last thing we need is more expensive medicine, and having biological trade secrets released will help humanity as a whole.
I've done a little research on AIDS, for example, and to give you an example of what patents do for the cost of medicine, take a look at this quote from the New York Times article, "Look at Brazil."
"Until a year ago, the triple therapy that has made AIDS a manageable disease in wealthy nations was considered realistic only for those who could afford to pay $10,000 to $15,000 a year or lived in societies that could."
In developing countries, the cost of patented medication is the reason why many families cannot afford it and so many suffer from it. Now look at another quote from the same article:
"Brazil now produces some triple therapy for $3,000 a year and expects to do much better, and the price could potentially drop to $700 a year or even less."
Many countries cannot do this for fear of economic sanctions, which means the next logical step would be for companies to open up their medical and biological information, for the good of humanity. Not only will this help potential consumers of this medication, but also provide a base for other companies to build on to excel each other's knowledge.
There is actually a lot of data associated with human disease that has been made available to the public. There are three main DNA databases throughout the world: NCBI from the US, EMBL from Europe, and DDBJ from Japan. These public sequence databases have a plethora of links associated with them that you can explore and find out more about the biology of human disease from sequences to academic papers. An example of is the The Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man. The down side, of course, is that many of the newer papers require a subscription to read in their entirety.