May the source be with you: can a band of biologists who share data freely out-innovate the corporate researchers who hoard it?

Washington Monthly, July-August, 2002 by Nicholas Thompson

IN 1984, INTERNET PIONEER STEWART Brand made one of the most prescient observations of the technology era: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it is so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

Brand's insight is famous among computer programmers. But it is probably even more apt in explaining what is happening today in biology.

The cost and ease of sharing information in biological research is plummeting, thanks to computers and the Internet. Sending files over jerry-rigged 14K modems the way Brand did was convenient, but nothing compared to streaming swaths of genetic data worldwide in seconds. But at the same time, the potential value of new information in biology has been skyrocketing. Discovering a critical gene controlling, say, Alzheimer's or impotence, can be worth a fortune. That's why Wall Street has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms in the past 20 years. And it's why universities such as MIT and the University of California at Berkeley increasingly have become partial subsidiaries of corporations, licensing discoveries in return for pieces of the action.

The whole corporatized system, however, rests on the ability to hoard information. The information and its dissemination has to be owned through government-granted patents and licenses, if the discoverer is to make big money on it. In one way that's fine. The prospect of profits inspires research and our increasingly corporatized system has produced some notable medical breakthroughs and innovations--drugs to treat high cholesterol and depression, for example. Perhaps most famously, it was a private company hunting for gold, Celera, which figured out a new way to decode genetic data and spurred the mad race to mapping the human genome.

But hoarding information dashes directly with another imperative of scientific progress: that information be shared as quickly and widely as possible to maximize the chance that other scientists can see it, improve on it, or use it in ways the original discoverer didn't foresee. "The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true," reads the Albert Einstein quote inscribed on a memorial outside the National Academy of Sciences offices in Washington.

The great physicist, then, might be disappointed if he learned that in 2002 he'd need approval from 34 different patent holders before buying a new kind of rice genetically engineered in Costa Rica to resist a tropical virus. Or that, according to a recent Journal of the American Medical Association survey, three times as many academic geneticist believe that sharing has decreased in their field over the past decade as believe it has increased--despite the ease with which one can now transfer information online. Indeed, nearly three-fourths of the geneticists surveyed said that a lack of sharing had slowed progress in the their field. Info-hoarding may help explain at least part of the decline in pharmaceutical innovation. According to study by the nonprofit National Institute for Health Care Management, a rapidly increasing percentage of new drugs approved by the FDA have the same active ingredients as other drugs on the market. In other words, the industry may not be innovating as much learning how to market and package old drugs in new ways.

Fortunately, a potentially revolutionary counter-trend is developing. A small but growing number of scientists, most of them funded by the National Institutes of Health, are conducting cutting-edge research into the most complex problems of biology not in highly secure labs but on the Internet, for all the world to see. Called "open-source biology," this work is the complete antithesis of corporatized research. It's a movement worth watching--and rooting for.

Dallas Cowboy

One of the most interesting innovators of this new type of biology is Alfred Gilman, who received the 1994 Nobel Prize in medicine. Four years ago, Gilman founded the Alliance for Cellular Signaling, a coalition of scientists based in Dallas striving to build a virtual cell that will allow scientists to perform experiments completely on their computers. Want to know how changing the concentration of a protein affects the cell? Or, how two specific proteins bind together--the basis for most pharmaceutical drugs? Type it in online and test for yourself. Don't bother with test tubes or mice.

Developing a new drug typically takes about a decade and costs hundreds of millions of dollars. But Gilman's plan could accelerate a critical stage from a few years to a few minutes. "If it works, it will make testing drugs much easier and much cheaper," he says.

To get there, Gilman isn't hoarding his findings, but unloading them directly into the public domain and spurning patents and copyright. He won't rely on brilliant insights coming as he sits cross-legged in a woodshed; he's going to organize a massive public brainstorm and rely on the collective wisdom of his many collaborators. Seven core labs will serve as central coordinators as the undertaking evolves, but hundreds of other people will pipe in over the Internet. Nearly 500 scientists worldwide have already lined up to design descriptive Web pages for molecules key to the inner workings of cells.