Lewis Thomas waxes poetical about the tremendous boost to the public welfare when science in general started to publish.
In Isaac Newton's day, to return to math, mathematicians challenged each other to solve set problems, so they *didn't* publish their techniques - and of course advances came much more slowly than they do now, even in small fields.
Of course we have to come up with some other way to feed the mathematicians - pretty much social cachet in sponsoring good universities, with some practical pay for teaching - but open inquiry is so much more productive than closed that we're all richer anyway.
The Terminator complex, particularly, was developed elsewhere with public money and then sold to Monsanto.
bT, a natural pesticide normally used in brief infrequent doses, will be made useless by wide insect exposure to bT-infused crops. Monsanto admits this; they still see no responsibility to leave it as a public good. (I'm sure they're happy to ruin any pesticide they don't sell.)
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Lewis Thomas waxes poetical about the tremendous boost to the public welfare when science in general started to publish.
In Isaac Newton's day, to return to math, mathematicians challenged each other to solve set problems, so they *didn't* publish their techniques - and of course advances came much more slowly than they do now, even in small fields.
Of course we have to come up with some other way to feed the mathematicians - pretty much social cachet in sponsoring good universities, with some practical pay for teaching - but open inquiry is so much more productive than closed that we're all richer anyway.
The Terminator complex, particularly, was developed elsewhere with public money and then sold to Monsanto.
bT, a natural pesticide normally used in brief infrequent doses, will be made useless by wide insect exposure to bT-infused crops. Monsanto admits this; they still see no responsibility to leave it as a public good. (I'm sure they're happy to ruin any pesticide they don't sell.)