In my experience (grad student at a university mentioned in the article) the effect is often more subtle than the worst case scenarios the article writes about.
The situation is closely related to political lobbying. Sure 99% of the time the politician was going to vote that way anyway, and the money didn't really sway him, so no vote was really bought, was it? (nudge nudge wink wink)
What I've heard happening is maybe an important but subtle control doesn't get run. Maybe you don't mention the mouse got sick because your experiment wasn't really checking for that. It happened before corporate influence, because there are always people trying to get ahead, get that big paper. There's just more money at stake now rather than reputation.
Actually, it's fairly well known now that a significant number of ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection - specifically Helicobacter pylori (hope I spelled that right). Those people taking black market Zantac would be better served by black market antibiotics.:)
And anyway, if you could develop a drug that cures a hole in your stomach (or anywhere for that matter) without causing cancer, you'd be a very rich multinational corporation.
Good post. A few more points to add:
I've seen Craig Venter, the head of Celera, talk twice now, and he told an excellent story about how he got where he is. He was running TIGR (the institute for genomic research) which had sequenced a few bacterial genomes. He wanted to apply shotgun sequencing techniques to human DNA, but was getting tons of flak and skepticism about whether or not it was even possible. Then Perkin Elmer came to him and said; "Hey we've got this great new DNA sequencer that's a magnitude or so faster than everything out there today. Want to sequence human? Oh yeah, and we'll give $300 million dollars to set up a company to do it." So, even though he'd been an academic all his life he was getting paid to do something he wanted to do anyway, and not have to deal with the usual academia nonsense. Plus, if you beat the public project, then you get to thumb your nose at all the guys who told you it wouldn't work. Who would say no?
He also said that since Celera is a for-profit company the drawback is that he's obligated to the shareholders to try and make some sort of profit. That means some of the more obviously important and potentially profitable genes are going to be patented, but mainly he said it should be a service company. Anybody who ran a BLAST search last a year ago knows that GenBank was mess until they recently cleaned it up. Though I haven't seen it myself, I understand that the Celera database is beautifully easy to navigate.
Not sure I agree with Science publishing with restrictions either. But the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, I think: (1)two analyses are better than one. (2)The data is still publicly accessable. (3)It will be irrelevent in another few years when the public project finishes and cleans the sequence.
(This is my first post!)
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The situation is closely related to political lobbying. Sure 99% of the time the politician was going to vote that way anyway, and the money didn't really sway him, so no vote was really bought, was it? (nudge nudge wink wink)
What I've heard happening is maybe an important but subtle control doesn't get run. Maybe you don't mention the mouse got sick because your experiment wasn't really checking for that. It happened before corporate influence, because there are always people trying to get ahead, get that big paper. There's just more money at stake now rather than reputation.
And anyway, if you could develop a drug that cures a hole in your stomach (or anywhere for that matter) without causing cancer, you'd be a very rich multinational corporation.
Actually, the human genome is 3 Gbases. So that's like 5 CDs (and without the annotation.)
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/About/The_Courses/cs301/ when_enough.html
Cool. You just justified "Temptation Island". I love that show.
Good post. A few more points to add: I've seen Craig Venter, the head of Celera, talk twice now, and he told an excellent story about how he got where he is. He was running TIGR (the institute for genomic research) which had sequenced a few bacterial genomes. He wanted to apply shotgun sequencing techniques to human DNA, but was getting tons of flak and skepticism about whether or not it was even possible. Then Perkin Elmer came to him and said; "Hey we've got this great new DNA sequencer that's a magnitude or so faster than everything out there today. Want to sequence human? Oh yeah, and we'll give $300 million dollars to set up a company to do it." So, even though he'd been an academic all his life he was getting paid to do something he wanted to do anyway, and not have to deal with the usual academia nonsense. Plus, if you beat the public project, then you get to thumb your nose at all the guys who told you it wouldn't work. Who would say no? He also said that since Celera is a for-profit company the drawback is that he's obligated to the shareholders to try and make some sort of profit. That means some of the more obviously important and potentially profitable genes are going to be patented, but mainly he said it should be a service company. Anybody who ran a BLAST search last a year ago knows that GenBank was mess until they recently cleaned it up. Though I haven't seen it myself, I understand that the Celera database is beautifully easy to navigate. Not sure I agree with Science publishing with restrictions either. But the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, I think: (1)two analyses are better than one. (2)The data is still publicly accessable. (3)It will be irrelevent in another few years when the public project finishes and cleans the sequence. (This is my first post!)