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[ox] FYI: Salon[26 Feb 2002]: Genome liberation. The information that details who we are is too important to be privately owned.



FYI: Ein ziemlich langer Artikel (3 Teile) zu Fragen der "Offenheit"/freien 
Verfügbarkeit von Genom-Informationen.

Gruß, Robert

###

"Genome liberation

 The information that details who we are is too important to be privately 
owned.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
 By Annalee Newitz

[...]

In the world of free and open-source software, the underlying code to a 
software program is made publicly available for anyone to share, copy or 
modify. For bioinformatics researchers, the idea of being able to share 
software code and benefit from each other's research exerts a strong appeal 
that is synergistically linked with their belief that information about human 
genetic code should also be freely available. 

Free software has historically been a realm inhabited by geeks who sometimes 
have difficulty making their concerns comprehensible to the general public. 
In contrast, the worries of life sciences workers come at a time when public 
awareness over the new possibilities of biotech is surging. When kittens and 
sheep are being cloned, how long can it be before we have the ability to 
clone humans? 

[...]

For scientists who work with genomes and proteins, possibly the most radical 
position they can take is that their research is for the public good, and 
therefore their data should be available in the public domain. The problem 
is, few members of the general public are well-trained enough to appreciate 
the value of a software program that, for example, aligns your cDNA sequence 
to a gene or set of genes. Nor would many care to use their computers to 
predict the secondary structure of a protein. 

Thus, for many scientists, putting data in the public domain means sharing it 
with other scientists. Doing this might mean placing your newly discovered 
protein structures in a public database. Or, if you want to publish your 
findings, it could mean working with Michael Eisen on the Public Library of 
Science, a free, peer-reviewed scientific publishing project the U.C. 
Berkeley professor initiated to combat the problem of having to buy hundreds 
of prohibitively expensive science journals in order to "share" knowledge 
with his peers. Like many in the life sciences, Eisen dislikes the 
commercialization -- and, for all practical purposes, privatization -- that 
occurs when scientists place their valuable findings in journals that other 
scientists can't access because their universities or labs haven't got a 
subscription. 

[...]

Open-source contracts may be the most elegant solution for scientists who 
want to share their work. "I know many people at U.C. Berkeley produce 
open-source semi-illicitly," Brenner says. "And I've been contacted by many 
people who want the [open-source contract] arrangement." 

A more radical response to privatization of the genome and bioinformatics 
software would be to open up the entire scientific process. This is exactly 
what Jeff Bizzaro, founder of Bioinformatics.org, proposes to do. His site, 
which has attracted thousands of members from across the globe, hosts several 
open-source bioinformatics projects. But the site isn't just about software. 
It's also about making the process of scientific discovery public and 
collaborative. Bizzaro encourages scientists to post their findings on the 
site so that, for example, two scientists could conduct complementary 
experiments halfway across the globe from each other. 

[...]

Bring the genome to the people -- that's the biopunk way. "

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/02/26/biopunk/index.html

-- 
Von/From: Dipl.-Inform. Robert Gehring
E-Mail:   rag cs.tu-berlin.de
privat:   zoroaster snafu.de
________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.de/
Organisation: projekt oekonux.de


[English translation]
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