It did cost a lot of money to do this research, and the taxpayers of the US are likely the ones who funded most of it, a long time ago. The researchers in question here made their living by receiving governments grants.

You could say that since Bayh-Dole basically gives universities the rights to the discoveries, the universities just end up as caretakers of public-held intellectual knowledge, but I don't think they always act in the best interests of the public.

When considering things like biotech, the vast majority of funding is coming from the government, especially for the more pure research.

In practice, that rule has been bent to the point where it no longer has any meaning. You can't patent a DNA sequence, but you can patent the DNA sequence in purified form. Want to check to see if you're the carrier of a particular, naturally-occurring, patented DNA sequence? You had better not purify your own DNA, or you will be violating the patent.

Here's an analogy for you: honey is a naturally-occurring substance, which is usually found mixed in with undesirable materials like wax and live bees. If you applied the same criteria as biological patents, you could patent bottled honey since that's an artificial creation.
Technically you could patent the process of warming honeycomb and letting the honey drip out, just to prove that you invented honey, but it wouldn't be necessary. Just the honey in the bottle would be enough.

And that should be a sickening thought for anyone.

I am truly sorry on several levels, but you are incorrect that the molecules themselves were not patented. They were, and that is the travesty.

Perhaps this is one of the few occasions when the righteous indignation is right on the money.

It looks like this whole topic is littered with information, so here are some translations for you all.

This is definitely a process patent, but not much of it is patentable.
Step (a) uses a centrifugation process that every biochemist knows, and they cite a 1985 paper.
Step (b) is another basic purification step based on selective precipitation, and again is a standard technique.
Step (c) means that they re-dissolved the protein, pretty special...
Steps (d,e) could be unique if they did anything really extraordinary. It's been too many years since I've been a practicing crystallographer, so I can't say if anything in those steps is very unusual. I doubt it: vapor diffusion etc is pretty typical as an overall technique.
Steps (f-h) and (2i) are also just basic crystallography procedures.

In this patent, there's just nothing but crystals and structures, period.

That's BS, and you should know it.

Here are two of the related patents: 1, 2.

They claim the structure itself, which is only possible due the legal loopholes which permit patenting biological information because it was in a "useful form", like purified DNA. By my count, the clock should have started running on that claim back in the 50s. They describe the use of the structure, to work with antibiotic modeling etc, as an embodiment of their invention, but that is not the real focus of the invention.

The patent itself should make it obvious that they aren't patenting a process or antibiotic: in the text check "D. Methods of Using the Atomic Coordinates of the 50S Ribosomal Subunit to Identify and Design Ligands of Interest". They cite tired old references such as "Molecular Modeling on the PC, 1998, John Wiley & Sons" (molecular modeling from 1998?!) and computer software packages like GRID (which could be used as part of an antibiotic design process). There is no specific example in the patent for actually using their structure to produce a particular antibiotic or drug. The text makes it blatantly clear that the processes they describe are nothing BUT prior art, and are only useful with the real focal point of the patent, which is the structure.

It's all just part of the game we play. Raw information is patented as "inventions" because we can, and it looks good on a resume and it's legal ammunition to throw around in this horribly broken system.

A DUI doesn't necessarily put you into Canada's "Inadmissible Classes" (their legal term) permanently. If 5 or more years have passed, you can apply for an "Approval of Rehabilitation" that will permanently void the DUI issue.

I know someone that ran into this (unexpectedly, I recall) when he traveled to Canada recently. It delayed him for about a day to have the paperwork processed, which involved getting US police to fax appropriate documentation to the Canadians. In the end he was allowed in.

What is so surprising or shocking about being courteous? I've got some additional things to add to the normal procedure when pulled over:

Turn on the interior lights, if it's night.

Open the window in advance.

Turn off the car, and remove the keys. Place them where they can be easily seen. In some car's I've had with flat roofs and large rain gutters, I've placed them in the rain gutter over the door. Up on the dash is another decent place.

And follow liquidsin's recommendations for the other stuff. These things won't inconvenience you, they will speed up the whole process, and it will reduce the probability of a misunderstanding with very serious consequences.

My law enforcement friends have informed me that some people as a group already do this stuff: Californians, in particular. I don't know exactly why that is, except that where I live the only CA people are either tourists or students. The local people here do NOT take these kinds of precautions. And while I disagree with the implication from the GP that the person being stopped is responsible for any officer errors, I don't see why it's unreasonable to take some precautions.

I don't have an extensive background on this to be certain, just vague recollections from my father (former IBM systems engineer) and personal experience using such systems, but I'm pretty sure that IBM has long been the dominant company providing POS systems, and DOS has not been the primary OS for such systems.

Unix/AIX was the foundation for POS starting in the late 80s, and many of these systems have been in service for almost two decades now, only being replaced recently. Smaller companies probably made use of more customized (cobbled together?) DOS and Windows POS setups, but big retailers like WalMart have used a server and thin-client model.

Most highly-ordered large biomolecules are not "thermodynamically stable", since it takes so much entropy to maintain them (which is to say that the entropy is low). Some exceptions might be nasty molecules like prions or amyloids, which tend to form extended fibers and sheets, with very negative effects.

But kinetic stability can lead to effective thermodynamic stability due to some unique effects. For example, there can be a kinetic barrier to disassembly of a large biomolecule because it's tough to remove that first subunit. Once the first subunit is gone, the "chink in the armor" allows the whole thing to begin to fall apart. But because the whole assembly is stable until the first one leaves, it has the effect of being globally stable.

But getting back to the big picture, DNA can be very stable, as evidenced by recovery of DNA more than thousands of years old. Of course it won't be retaining complex quaternary structures like those developed by the researchers. On the other hand, it's very desirable to have nanostructures with a finite lifetime, especially one that can be controlled. If it's used for drug delivery packaging, you might want it to last only a few days. If it's a template for hard materials (iron-based magnetic structures, for example), you might want to be able to cause it to fall apart intentionally within a few hours. DNA isn't really a good candidate for permanent nanomaterials, since it can be degraded both passively and actively by quite a few different pathways.

Here's the older topic:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/08/0344248

And the older scientific publication: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7243/full/nature07971.html

The real difference in this publication compared to the previous one is that these researchers are making really compact bundles while the previous ones have more flexible (probably) hollow structures dependent on key localized interactions. These are more likely driven by the summation of lots of little effects.

Without having read the article yet, it seems to be a common theme of top-down vs bottom-up design, which is a topic that crops up frequently.

Ironically, I don't think it's possible to beat chemical-based energy sources for providing heat.

Efficiency is nearly ideal when you want energy and not work, so I can easily envision electric vehicles carrying a supplementary propane system to provide cabin (and battery) heating in the cold. There are also propane-fueled AC units, so it could serve double duty. The simplicity and low weight of such an auxiliary system makes it little more than an afterthought addition to the overall engineering.

I won't argue that many new cars are unnecessarily convoluted and make use of proprietary systems. However, a lot of the basic vehicle maintenance and repair issues aren't assisted much by computer diagnostics: in general they are only useful for reporting on sensor status.

I have an example of "backyard mechanic-ing" on a modern vehicle. A friend's Audi A4 was misfiring, and the OBDII system wasn't really reporting anything useful. This isn't surprising, since there isn't any feedback on the ignition circuits, which include one coil per cylinder, and is fully electronic (no distributor, etc).

I performed diagnostics with some LEDs ripped out of a scrap computer case I has lying around. Tapping into the various control circuits with the LEDs functioning as noid lights let us see the ignition pulses through the various components of the system. In the end it turned out to be a problem with a glorified, overpriced relay.

Computer diagnostics would have been no use to us. To my knowledge, this type of scenario (substantial engine components without feedback circuits) is the standard, and I've run into it often enough with vehicles to plan an Arduino-based monitoring and diagnostic system.

I'm guessing that you haven't been involved with actual NIH/NSF funding.

Resource allocation isn't performed randomly: it mirrors actual real-world concerns. Cancer research is huge, as is Alzheimer's. Energy-related research has jumped in popularity in recent years.

The problem with a private-sector approach to research is that by definition it's going to involve secrecy until you find something marketable. There would be large incentives to keep every discovery private. With the current system, you only need to keep your discoveries private until they can be published.

That's a much lower barrier to information-sharing, and the end result is that there is much more communication going on, which helps everyone and discourages resource-wasting duplicated work. In addition, the publication barrier is dropping every year, with more credence given to pre-publication resources as a way to stake your claim in a field.

If it comes down to selfish profiteering vs altruistic sharing, sharing is a better way to build knowledge.

You said that the patent "covers the procedure of looking at the results", which implies that a procedure was specified and patented.

That's not the case: they did not patent any procedure. Their patent is more or less covering the whole concept of these compounds in a medicinal context. Any analysis at all would be infringing.

Perhaps I was nit-picking too much.

No, they patented the very idea of looking at those chemicals, as you recognized later in your statements. That's exactly why there was no good reason to issue these patents.