Rare Sharing of Data Led To Results In Alzheimer's Research

jamie passes along a story in the NY Times about how an unprecedented level of openness and data-sharing among scientists involved in the study of Alzheimer's disease has yielded a wealth of new research papers and may become the template for making progress in dealing with other afflictions. Quoting: "The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort. 'It was unbelievable,' said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer's researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. 'It's not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.'"

Comments

This is real science.

[Raelus]

Stop trying to replace it with a capitalistic mockery of science.

Re:This is real science.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the reasons the field of astronomy has made such amazing advances. There is no money to be made in figuring out how the universe works so everyone is very open about their work.

Re:This is real science.

[immakiku]

Indeed. Back in the day Science and math was shared freely through notes and letters among intellectuals. The scientists of that era actually achieved their potentials for the most part.

In our time, we have much better ways to communicate, yet our abilities are stifled far below maximum potential because of what appears to be petty reasons

Re:This is real science.

[Anonymous Coward]

The mess we have where potentially-useful information is kept secret and proprietary, in the name of profit or even just potential profit.

Re:This is real science.

[TheEyes]

The patent craziness.

For some bizarre reason, the US, the EU, and many other places have decided that it's okay to patent basic concepts: human and animal genes, business methods, math (also known as software patents), etc, rather than the end-stage products that patents were originally meant to cover. As a result, many fields of innovation are grinding to a halt, as people scramble to place roadblocks and paywalls across the road of innovation. Biology can't go anywhere because dozens of different groups have patents on basic testing procedures and even the genes themselves. Computer programmers can't get anywhere because programming has become a minefield, where bits arranged in certain ways can suddenly see you being sued for millions of dollars.

The moment the walls are lowered, even for a short period in a limited field, great things can be accomplished in a short amount of time, but the exceptions will remain exceptions if the non-innovators keep thinking there's profit to be made in continual delay.

Re:This is real science.

[bunratty]

Back when Tycho Brahe refused to give Kepler access to his observations of the night sky and Darwin didn't publish his ideas until decades after he first had them. And when Mendel fudged his data about heredity and Millikan threw away data he didn't like about the charge of an electron. Oh, wait.

Re:This is real science.

[xMilkmanDanx]

+9000

all fundamental science should NEVER be patentable. mother nature has prior art

Re:This is real science.

[immakiku]

In those cases the reasons are all personal, whereas now the hiding and protecting of research seems codified into our society.

Re:This is real science.

[Luckyo]

Real patent problems almost never to never make news. They are about people dropping research outright, without ever getting to the point of infringing patents, because of simple FEAR or infringement, or because when they start, the lawyer tells them to drop it because of the aforementioned risk. Number of such cases dwarfs the cases that actually progress to level of getting actual patent problems.

Yes, it is this bad. What you see on slashdot doesn't count as a tip of an iceberg - it's more of a few ice crystals from the tip of the iceberg at best.

Re:This is real science.

[Nemyst]

Current business is "make money within 6 months or GTFO".

Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but not by a whole lot. Even in the best of cases, things like extrasolar planet discoveries, the LHC or other "fundamental" science don't have applications within 10 if not 20 or 50 years, maybe more. They're of no use to business even though business will thrive on it in the future.

Uh, wow

[Rijnzael]

It's great to see that they suspended profit and property motive for the pursuit of something that can improve the lives of humanity as a whole. It's a nice change, even if temporary, against the backdrop of patented genes, seeds, and the like in our day and age.

*At least that's what it sounds like, I don't have an NYTimes login and don't have interest in one, so I didn't RTFA.

This is great news, and a great step forward.

[Red_Chaos1]

Now all we need is for this to become the norm.

Quite frankly I don't understand how it has been allowed for things like genes and sequences and such to be patented, and I think the notion that such things can be patented is ridiculous. But who am I, other some peon somewhere, right?