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Wired on Open Source Biology

John Wilbanks, January 18th, 2005

An interesting article from Wired on the folks at Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS), a group in Australia advocating an open-source approach to biology. I know the folks at BIOS and recommend you poke around their site if you’re interested in open biology.

Here’s the story; it’s a good read.

One point, which is actually pretty major, of contention. We see Science Commons described as being in a supposed “battle” with the biotechnology companies of the world.

This is a perception that Science Commons will have to work against - the idea that, by advocating voluntary changes to inefficient systems, we are somehow “against” the companies pursuing scientific innovation. It’s just not the case.

I have a feeling I’m going to be making this particular point a lot. We are not trying to convince people to “abandon” their patents. We are instead trying to create a network of rights that will support innovation in the sciences, much like Creative Commons has built a network of rights that support legal distribution and reuse of creative works.

What do I mean by this? Well, right now, if I’m working on a rare disease (diseases that are not profitable to pursue by for-profit pharmaceutical companies) I might face multiple barriers. First, I have to hire a lawyer to negotiate multiple licenses with multiple universities on various genetic research tools. Second, once I use those tools to discover a set of genes, I have to send my lawyer back out to negotiate with the owners of patents on the use of those genes. Given that I’m not likely to make money on a drug (it’s a rare disease after all), why should I spend my research money on a lawyer instead of science? But that’s exactly what is happening…despite the fact that, in many cases, the holders of those patents would be happy to let me operate in my area, as long as I didn’t infringe on their areas of reasearch.

This is the kind of problem we’re trying to solve at Science Commons. We want to work with all of the stakeholders, commercial and non-commercial, to encourage the publication of legally available scientific knowledge, whether that knowledge is represented in literature, patents, or data. It’s not a “battle” for us. It’s an exploration of how to build just such a Web of knowledge so that collaborative research and discovery in science can grow to Web scale.