yalepatents.org is on temporary hiatus while I finish my dissertation, but I thought I’d share some relevant sources of procrastination from the past few weeks. First of all, On Point, the news program from WBUR-Boston, hosted a discussion on gene patenting and the Myriad/BRCA case. Tom Ashbrook and his guests hold an accessible discussion, providing a nice starting point for those interested in gene patenting and biotech industry. Notably, Chris Hansen of the ACLU defends his organization’s side in the case, arguing that a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs will not hinder biotech patents, but will promote competition and innovation in the industry.
Getting away from the economic immediacy of biotech intellectual property, some recent literature begs the question: what is professional bioethics good for? Some of the recent discussion has been prompted by a new book, Observing Bioethics, by Renee C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey. Though I look forward to reading it as soon as possible, Sally Satel provides a provocative review in The New Republic. Satel, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has written that the political and professional wing of the bioethics movement (in government and on hospital staffs) has distracted attention from its academic soul, transforming a philosophical field into an activist one.
Arriving as populist movements battle healthcare reform, this critique of bioethics is quite timely. However, the anti-bioethics position conveniently, and attractively, avoids anti-elitism. Satel argues in a recent essay from the Hoover Institution that bioethicists simply don’t have an expert advantage over average citizens the way geologists do in the climate change debate. Rather, when they participate in the political discussion or on hospital review boards, “their value is mainly cosmetic or bureaucratic”.
Book Review: Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes, by David Koepsell.
Common wisdom holds that, at this historical moment of economic upheaval, war, and the broad threats to the relative homeostasis of our natural world (including from climate change and modern pandemics), the deliberation of law and policy occurs under a firm utilitarian mandate to maximize welfare with the inexact tools of government. As political instruments, patents and copyrights are the utmost in means-to-an-end: “a highly pragmatic invention”, David Koepsell calls intellectual property rights, not entirely as a compliment. In his newest book, however, Koepsell argues for a holistic reexamination of an increasingly far-reaching policy—the issuing of human gene patents. His analysis is not limited to economic arguments for or against our current intellectual property regime. Rather, he interjects with a question that many brush-off in the heated debate about scientific intellectual property: “is the current treatment of DNA as intellectual property consistent with its nature?”
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The Obama administrations’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has extended the deadline for comment about new rules requiring the results of government-funded research be available to the public. These rules will, most likely, undercut the current system of research journals, which make money by charging both authors and readers (subscriptions run in the thousands of dollars). The Electronic Freedom Foundation has weighed-in on the issue, calling public access “so blindingly, obviously good that you have to wonder why it hasn’t already been implemented.” At Techdirt, Mike Masnick, who writes about the economics and politics of new media, says of science journals: “It’s a great scam, and they don’t want it to end.”
Open-access journals have come into their own recently; some of the titles from the Public Library of Science (PloS) have even broken even, showing that quality, peer-reviewed journals can operate with an open model. However, as I wrote a few days ago, there is a spectrum possibility when it comes to “public access”. Public repositories such as PubMed Central provide access to publications (i.e. text, figures, and supplementary data that is included in the original paper). As research becomes more data intensive, the real challenge is going to design systems to hold extremely large data sets, and provide the public access to that data in the form of useful, interpretable “information”.
Among other things, the healthcare debate has revealed to a large audience that our attempts at shaping the drug market are a cats-cradle of contradictory regulation. A short history: Academic scientists who research future drugs are well aware of the Bayh-Dole Act which, in 1980, enabled researchers to patent and profit from taxpayer-funded innovation. It was a bold attempt to encourage the movement of ideas from universities into the marketplace, where they can benefit society. Meanwhile, the same federal government, cognizant that patents are actually monopolies designed to boost drug prices, realized that this effect must be mitigated to keep healthcare costs down. In 1984, the Hatch-Waxman Act enacted regulations to encourage generic-drug manufacturers (representing the competitive threat that patents were meant to address in the first place) to contest the original patents in court. How would the government get generic manufacturers to challenge the brand-name patents? By promising the generic manufacturer a second round of protection from competition in the event it wins the dispute. Today the Federal Trade Commission releases its new report, complaining that brand-name and generic drug manufacturers have found a profitable loophole by entering into agreements to avoid fighting over patents in the first place. The proposed remedy? The FTC wants to enact new legislation, making these anticompetitive agreements (over patent monopolies) illegal.
Michael Kinsley’s “Cut This Story!” is a must-read for anyone who writes (or reads) in 2010. The article, in this month’s Atlantic, offers the latest diagnosis on the decline of print media: the excessive wordiness of traditional newspaper articles. Long, comma-laden sentences, once useful for providing context in the slow, print-only world, now only distract from the the modern, networked reader’s main goal: extracting useful bits of newsworthy information.
Kinsley writes of the print-journalism trade, but in his description of the modern information-seeker, he identifies a general problem yet unsolved by internet technology. People and software become better and faster at searching through data–articles, databases, images–but accessing that data is still like using a glorified card catalog: entering in a search term, finding a set of web pages that might be relevant, and then wading through content to find an answer. The goal of computer scientists is to turn the internet into an intelligent research librarian, able itself to sift through information to answer questions directly. The so-called “semantic web” promises to transform the way we interact with information, especially in fields like the life sciences, where the research community has been side-swiped by a flood of interdisciplinary data coming from new technologies. However, for the semantic web to become a reality is going to require a revolution in the way scientists and others share data that is currently proprietary, and, even among government-funded academics, the incentives for opening up such data are still missing.
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In a post last week, I was critical of the Connecticut Stem Cell Program, a 4-year-old fund for research grants that was cut out of the current budget proposal. My main criticism was that $10 million/year and an ad-hoc oversight board are not sufficient to justify the praise and hopes directed towards the program by state politicians–such programs are a distraction from the task of rebuilding the Connecticut economy. The larger issue, however, is whether states competing against each other to offer research incentives is really the best use of tax revenue in general. A new essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education argues that investing in technology research is a risky game for states, and that the federal government should step in and increase research funding in their place.
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