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Science

Caltech DNA Sequencer Patent Question 101

Posted by timothy from the finger-in-every-pot dept.
brusk writes: "An article from this Sunday's Los Angeles Times is a fascinating investigation of the background to the Caltech spinoff company that produced and sells the DNA sequencer that will be responsible for a complete draft of the human genome within a month or two. It appears that despite denials by the developers and Caltech, millions in NSF and other federal grants went into the development of the sequencer. This is supposed to give federal agencies large discounts on their purchases of sequencers and input into how the devices are marketed. This has interesting implications for the future of these for-profit spinoffs from academe. Perhaps even more significantly, the article raises questions about whether the patent application misrepresented the development process, which could invalidate the company's patent on the sequencing technology. This could shake up biotech world."
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Caltech DNA Sequencer Patent Question More

Caltech DNA Sequencer Patent Question

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  • Hm... good point. It made me think though...am i the only one who sees something wrong with the government subsidizing and indirectly funding several large corporations, who then use this money to develop technologies that they restrict/patent/lock away? Remember that companies serve the governenment in a way (it's in the gov't best interest that it's countries' corporations lead their respective fields, provide them with income through taxes, and, supposedly, ultimately serve for the good of the people) It just doesn't seem right to me, but i could be wrong.

  • Anybody else find this admirable? (Score:5)

    by Guppy ( 12314 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @04:52PM (#1070809)
    At the end of the article, you'll find a few paragraphs that talk about a professor who had apparently done crucial work on the sequencer, yet was not named as an inventor on the patent (thus depriving him of royalties and recognition).

    ...Asked why he had not pursued the issue of his omission from the patent, Huang said that he cared more about the science than about matters of ownership and money.

    "If I opened the door for someone else to go through, that's enough. You have to decide where you get your gratification."

    After reading of all the ongoing legal manuevering and spinning, this made me stop for a moment. There are still scientists out there who are dedicated to higher goals, thank god.

  • Something warm and fuzzy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wanna pour some hot grits down the Caltech's Dean's pants!
  • Hey! I've patented that technique!
  • Hey, this isn't a spelling flame, but it's "G-A-T-T-A-C-A". It's a subtle joke...
  • Excuse me if I nitpick, but it was closer to 800g + 800ug--making his cut of the pie that much bigger.
  • The real question is, why are these "schools" --- when viewed as v.c. funds / incubators that book profits from investment and royalty income --- why is that these "schools" are not only tax-exempt, but they actually have easy and preferred access to federal handouts in the form of NIH / NSF funds?

    Because the students who actually participate in this V/C prep stuff is in the extreme minority. You're describing a class that enrolls perhaps 20 to 30 students a year (I took the class's predecessor, which didn't include writing a business plan) out of a graduating class of about 250. The majority of the students at Caltech could care less about going out and starting a business; they're more concerned with cutting edge research.

    Further, having been to Caltech, it's pretty clear Dr. Hood was the exception to the rule around there--while being at Caltech, you get pretty used to being in a rather rarified research atmosphere, it's about the science, and not about making bazillions of dollars.

    Caltech's undergraduates have a rather long history of counter-culture thinking, and in opposing anything that prevents the free exchange of ideas and research from taking place. "Know Ye The Truth And The Truth Shall Set Ye Free" happens to be the school motto, and most folks there swear by it.

    As to skimming 75% of the royaltees--this is actually the exception of many universities who take 100% of the royaltees of any inventions that you create there as part of your student career. This is akin to a company taking 100% of the research work you create when you work there, on research they fund and they provide the facilities for. That Caltech is willing to cut you in on a percentage of the profits of an invention that was created entirely on their dime and with their facilities is actually one of the more generous deals out there.
  • I'm a plant biology senior at UC Berkeley and one of my professors went over patents/IP law recently, so I have some understanding of how it works. Here at Berkeley, the general license agreement works so that the University of California Regents keep all the patents that come from our research. Private corporations that fund research get to be first in line to apply for a license (exclusive or otherwise), while the Federal Government always gets a license. Furthermore, from what I understand, most licenses/patents allow ues of a technology for non-profit/academic purposes (that's not really relevant, but I thought I'd mention it).

    While I'm posting, I might as well explain how patenting genes works, too. The way things are set up at the patent office now, you will not get a patent based solely on sequencing information. In order to even have a chance at a patent, you have to be able to predict the amino acid sequence of the protein the gene encodes (this isn't as easy as just reading across the sequence and matching codons [three letter 'words' in the sequence] with the corresponding amino acid -- only parts of the gene actually get transcribed into protein, the rest gets spliced out...so you have to know a bit about the gene to do this). Generally, however, people also try to get some understanding of a gene's function and operation before they apply for a patent, since this will strengthen their patent...which means maybe they can try to cover other organisms' copy of the gene in their pattern (so they could pattern a gene in, say, mice and also patent any gene that shares 70% of the sequence).

    I'm not sure if I explained that terribly well, but I hope it's clear. Now I'd like to present my take on patenting in biotech. Personally, I don't believe in patents. I'm somewhat idealistic -- I'd rather nobody ever had to patent anything because everyone would be socially responsible enough to give credit when using other people's work and to make their work available in return...basically, the GPL. I'd rather we all work because we're excited about what we're doing or we recognize that a service needs to be provided. Unfortunately, that's not the kind of world we live in right now. Patents seem to be necessary in modern economies. After college, I'm going to go back home and run my own biotech company -- and I will patent my work. Not because I believe in it, but because I need to in order to protect myself. If I am open about my work, then others will take it and incorporate it into their proprietary products and my family won't eat. This is why I prefer academic environments -- it's the closest you get to the GPL, because most licenses make exception for it.

    The last thing I'd like to bring up is something that I've rarely seen discussed, although it's highly relevant to biotech IP law. How will piracy develop in biotech? Many similarities can be drawn between biotech and CS, both in development and in the nature of the work...and I have no doubt that, once biotech products become more available on the market, they will be pirated. Probably not by individuals, but certainly by corporations. And while that may be illegal here, it's not in China (or a host of other countries)...and several of these countries (China in particular) have both the technological capability and the incentive to steal a product...and it is remarkably easy to do. All you need are a few cells -- you can propagate a whole population from them and then use it to study what Monsanto did and take it. If you never signed a license (or clicked one), would it be illegal? Will we have to sign some form of license agreement to shop in the GMO section at our supermarket? Or will we figure out how to encrypt genes somehow?

    Sorry if I rambled, this post got somewhat out of hand....
  • What amazes me is not that its been done, its how large of a undertaking it is. The genes which control transmition of signals (yeah, human body IO baby!) from the nose to the brain contain more data than I could probally fit on my harddrive.
  • You haven't actually read "Brave New World" have you. For one thing its about a sociallist planned "utopia". Funny how the book always gets used a for any scientific distopia that happen to spring to mind when someone (who has never read the book) starts a "is that what you want cos thats what'll happen still argument".
  • not that I hold these views, but just to play Devil's Advocate...

    they are on shaky moral ground - nature was here first, how can you claim to have invented it?

    I agree that humans cannot have claimed to have invented nature, but on the shaky moral ground aspect of your argument, I dare say that the cloners who created Dot (or Dotty?) the sheep were on shaky moral ground, but apparently that didn't stop them.

    I only hope that something can stop these people.
  • Yup. That's Henry Huang, now here at Washington University.

    And every time you read the NY Times caricaturing the Human Genome Project as slick big business versus slow and plodding federal lackies, remember two things: companies like Celera pay for PR firms, and universities like Washington University in St. Louis have people like Henry who only give a damn about doing the right thing for science.

  • Hey Dave,

    A few comments. First off, the incentive for professors (and Universities) to engage in basic research has not always been, and need not be, to gain patents. Successful reseach == academic prestige for both the researcher and the Unioveristy. This pays off in many ways (in the professor's case, in how much he or she can command in salery.)

    My secodn comment is I'm not sure uts as clear cut as you lay out. There is enough of an issue that my alma mater (University of Wisconsin) has invented a dodge. They do basic research wioth government money. If it looks like its going to turn into anything patentable WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research foundation, steps in and takes over the funding thus insuring all righst belong to WARF and all proceeds go to the Unviersity.

    This DOES however point out the enforcmenet problems inhearent in trying to prevent this sort of "privitization" of public research.

  • So what, doesn't it fit in the margin of this post? Wouldn't want humanity to miss out on this, watch out for buses.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen in a long time. Why couldn't this be done?
  • In principle, I agree with you -- the theft of coffee was biological piracy. However, coffee was not protected the same way a modern trade secret is. Monsanto will go to great lengths to assure that you don't get your hands on their proprietary trade-secret biological material...and the law (in most countries) will back them. There was no way to prevent someone from stealing coffee once they had their hands on the bean and, right now, the same applies with genetically modified material. But I'm thinking that big biotech firms will start doing the same things software companies do -- genes that degrade after a certain period of time if they're not supplemented with a chemical only the original purchaser will give you (read: short-term license agreement), obfuscated genes (since I can't think how you'd encrypt them), that sort of thing. If they do make you reliant on chemicals they have to keep their gene active, then we might see the development of middlemen who buy the chemicals from the companies and sell them to you, making sure everyone is happy.

    On another note, I don't drink coffee.
  • Nothing in this post said that the class was bad or evil - in fact, the class is excellent and does a great job of explaining entrepreneurship. Your facts are wrong about the number of people attending the class - it regularly fills the big lecture hall in Noyes, well over 100 seats. Certainly only a fraction sitting in are enrolled, but that's not the point.

    Really? It only had about 30 when I took it. But this was a dozen years ago.

    The point being made is that caltech is a business incubator and v.c. fund - a fund with billions in assets, research grants, and i.p. royalty streams, and a growing predilection for keeping information out of the public domain - until its demonstrated to be worthless or unexploitable.

    A point with which I strongly disagree. One of the functions of any university, public or private (Caltech is private) is to educate. That some students may find a class whereby they are connected to folks at a VC fund educational no more makes Caltech a business than running a class on algaebraic systems makes Caltech an arm of the NSA.

    That Caltech derives revenue from various IP royaltee streams does not mean Caltech has scraped it's roots as a university and research facility--Universities have historically derived a portion of their continuing funding through licensing IP, amongst other things. Hell, Caltech also derives a portion of it's operating revenue through it's contract with NASA where it provides the administrative overview of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Does that make Caltech the government as well?

    Fact: Caltech faculty and students are required to pass all possibly patentable ideas through the caltech IP office before an attempt is made to publish.

    Actually, no. The Office of Technology Transfer only requires notification when the facility or student believes an invention was created and wishes to have it patented. That is, OTT doesn't force all research which may contain possibly patentable ideas through it first in order to screen for possible patents--the OTT simply doesn't have the manpower to review all that research.

    Evidentally you agree that caltech is a business; all we are discussing now are the details of the deal the employees get.

    No, I do not. From Caltech's policies manual:

    The Institute's policy generally is to reserve to itself rights in inventions and computer software made by faculty and staff members with the use of Institute facilities or in the normal course of their Institute duties. The student's position is different, however, and students generally retain all rights except in inventions or computer software made under circumstances such that rights clearly belong to the Institute or to the sponsor of the research.


    That is, employees of Caltech (facility and staff members) assign their rights as is normal for any employer, including not-for-profit organizations and others. Students assign their rights only in those circumstances where the rights clearly shoudl belong to Caltech--such as they were performing research for a research group or as part of classwork where the student used Caltech equipment and performed the work under Caltech guidance.

    I was at Caltech when they decided to revise their IP policy, and was one of the students who raised a stink with the initial draft that didn't make what Caltech got the rights to clear enough.

    How high do you think the student's interests are on the priority list of the i.p. office?

    You clearly aren't a Caltech student or at least aren't a happy one. When I was there, Caltech's administration bent over backwards for the students--even going out of their way to help students who are financially strapped or otherwise having problems. Me, I was on the 5 year plan because I burnt out for personal reasons--and Caltech was more than happy to help.

    Are students priority one in Caltech's IP office? I'm quite sure of it.

    But now that you agree that caltech is in the intellectual property business, the question remains: why does it have tax free status?

    Well, I actually don't agree, so your question is moot.

    Why is caltech a tax sink rather than a tax source? Why can't microsoft relabel its employees as "students" or "postdocs", stop paying taxes and start applying for grants?

    Because the majority of Caltech's day to day operations are in education and research. Caltech has constantly ranked as one of the highest universities in the United States in terms of educational value for the dollar in undergraduate studies. Caltech also performs cutting edge research, as all universities with gradudate programs do, much of that research published without regards to protecting IP rights.

    Microsoft, on the other hand, is a for-profit corporation, which issues stock and pays dividends. Further, Microsoft provides no educational studies programs, nor does it provide any opportunities for undergraduate study or research. Microsoft is in the business of writing software, period. That they fund some research through providing grants and by hiring researchers to perform abstract research does not distract from the fact that they write software--these grants only serve the purpose of influencing the course of research done by various colleges and universities.

    Caltech and other research schools are not putting publically funded research into the public domain.

    And I guess all those papers that got published in a range of scholarly journals ranging from computer graphics to chemistry, nor any of the stuff done by JPL apparently counts, as it isn't real IP, as it doesn't generate revenue.

    Is that your point? That it doesn't count as IP unless it was potentially a direct revenue source, at which point, it counts? And of course it counts only if the university makes money off it?

    Isn't this a bit, ah, circular?

    You may argue that this isn't all bad --- but to deny it is to ignore reality.

    I guess I don't live in your reality, because I'm saying that you're flat out wrong. I'm sorry you don't see it.
  • Hi,
    Well, to put it in simple way, mapping is finding a chromosomal location for given gene relatively to so-called markers. There are different kinds of markers, they can be genes, sequences, restriction sites or whatever. When you are done with mapping, you can tell that gene A is somewhere between marker B and marker C on chromosome nr. [your favorite number here].
  • This article is not about who owns the human genome, or patenting genetic information. It is simply a matter of a publicly funded group patenting what has become a very useful tool for the biotech industry. If they did not use public money for their research then they have every right to patent their invention, a way of reading a genetic code. If they did use public money then they have to provide that tool to other public US institutions for a reduced cost. Either way this is not a very big deal, it will have little impact on what the sequencer is used for nor will PE biosystems have any claim to sequences decoded using their machine (the same way that microsoft has no claim over what you write using word). The only change that may occur is that the sequencer may cost less for public US research bodies and more licences may be issued.

  • That is, employees of Caltech (facility and staff members) assign their rights as is normal for any employer, including not-for-profit organizations and others. Students assign their rights only in those circumstances where the rights clearly shoudl belong to Caltech--such as they were performing research for a research group or as part of classwork where the student used Caltech equipment and performed the work under Caltech guidance.

    In fact, I believe you are understating the strength of the rights that Caltech gives to their students. The general catalog makes a point of stating clearly that even inventions developed using Caltech facilities are the property of the student, provided they weren't developed in the course of a student's classwork or research duties as an R.A. Try getting Microsoft to agree to those terms! The original poster can argue about how these policies play out in practice, but the plain truth is that Caltech's stated IP policy is very generous to the student.

    I'll be starting my Ph.D. at Caltech in three weeks (summer session) and one of the reasons I chose to go there was that many of the school's policies place the student's needs first. I was surprised to find that so many of the policies (e.g. the honor code) were designed to remove administrative obstacles and trivialities from the student's path rather than protect the institution from his presumed idiocy or malice. Compare this to almost any other institution, public or private, and I think you'll find that Caltech is a pretty enlightened place to be.

    --DA

  • Actually, I've discovered a real, rational, and feasible solution to virtually all the world's major problems. And it doesn't involve killing anybody. It's actually rather brilliant.
    Just thought you'd like to know.

    Nope, I already thought of that. That wouldn't work.
  • Retiring Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, not to mention voiding all kinds of international treaties.

    Then lets start there!


    ...................

    ... paka chubaka

  • Does this mean the government could have the say on whether or not other countries are sold the device

    The US government can tell any business not to do business in country X, independent or publicly funded. Kinda sucks ... strong encryption anyone?

  • There are certain things I believe in (I am however an atheist.) I believe that no matter how good UI's programmers create, there always will be a fool who will not use it in the intended way and will screw smth. up. I believe that marketing approach deteriorates products by writing out time-lines and forcing weekly releases. I believe that patenting human DNA is not going to help this society to get out of its own mediocrity. DNA was not created by these people, it was read by them. It is the same as for one to patent some forgotten ancient language on the basis that only this person can read it. However it is true that the process of reading can be patented. In this case the process is patentable. Now the question of the patent rights for the device: Let the jury decide who was right or wrong, we (I mean me) do not have the "real" facts, only what we have being told. Knowing that normally media does not deliver 100% truth, only 100% enterntainment, I would not rely on these reports too much. Basically, I believe that if the jury finds that the company did create the device without any grants, then there is no reason why the rights to the device should go fully or partially to the feds. If there were grants used to develop the device, then the company will have to share more.

    In any case, the patents expire and this one will too.
  • I think that if federal money, which comes from American citizens paying federal income tax, is used for scientific research, then it is only fair that American citizens be allowed to make free use of the results.

    Grants with patent restrictions are not allowed at most universities. University scholars are required to predisclose conflicts of interest. Universities OWN patent licensing rights to patents created by their employees - ie: the professors and other researchers. That is how the system currently works in academia. The patent holder(s) typically receive less than half of the patent royalties.

    The bottom line is that intellectual property is viewed as being held by the INVENTOR and the licensing is controlled by the INVENTOR's EMPLOYER. That is how intellectual property is conceptualized in the US today.

    That federal money was used for the research is justifiable in that 20 years from now the patents will be public domain. The federal money was used to bring new technology into our society.

    Feel free to disagree, but that is the current state of things. If federally funded grants had all thjir intellectual property public domain, then ALL of the monetary incentive for invention with federal funds would be gone. And there would be a tremendous shift of research out of academia. Maybe you view that as a good thing, but I do not.

  • Wow, he had that many folks down there?

    The hoodlab I'm used to maintaining only had at most 500 folks, if you include the off-campus place he had.

    I would make comments about his fitting in up here, but not under this userid...
  • The usefulness of patents is past. They are now just employment tools for legions of lawyers. Here is some common sense:

    If you have a great idea that will make you money, do something with it. If you don't want other people to know your secret while you go about making money, too bad.

    Government participation in the enforced protection of intellectual property always leads to ridiculous situations where only the lawyers gain.

    What's it going to take for us to recind the whole patent concept? I think it deserves a serious movement.


    ...................

    ... paka chubaka

  • Really? Show me some links. I'm just relaying what I've heard the researchers talk about where I work (e.g. Leory Hood's (former) Department) when they want frequent downloads of the draft human genome (a.k.a 3 GB's of A's, T's, G's, and C's).
  • Most important, the dispute could influence who gains control of the human genetic blueprint and all the medical miracles that it is expected to generate: the public or a few drug and biotech companies.

    It seems to me that this is going to be a problem no matter who wins this case. I know one thing for sure: I certainly wouldn't want a private corporation owning the genetic blueprint.

    The article says "the public", but I don't think this would work. It would probably be the government who actually controls this stuff. That would be okay, but I'd much rather have some kind of international organization controlling it.

    In my opinion, the federal government has full rights to the machine (because of the grants). It would just be nice if the technology / information could be shared equally with the entire world.

    Of course, there's always the possibility that the government may lose this case. It would really suck to have some mega-corporation controlling the future of genetic technology.

    // Spunkee

  • This quote is sort of interesting:

    In addition, the company started Celera Genomics, an affiliate that is using the sequencer machines in an all-out effort to be the first to decipher the entire human genetic code and claim property rights to it.

    What does having property rights to the entire human genetic code give them?
    While it may be a magnificent accomplishment, shouldn't something like that be publicly-owned?
  • When I read this article, I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry. Lloyd Smith - one of the inventors, the guy with the black belt in taekwondo - spoke as a guest lecturer just last month in my "Scientific Ethics" course. The topic, of course, was on avoiding ethical pitfalls in collaborations between academia & industry, and his "case study" was the development of the DNA sequencer mentioned in this article. He casually mentioned at the end of the talk that some folks were "looking in" to some of the nuances of the work, but he didn't really know or wasn't particularly concerned about what would be found.

    Whoops.

    Lloyd Smith is a cool guy, and has a damn impressive list of accomplishments to his name. He's since gone on to found (and sell for $$$$) a biotech company of his own while a member of the UW-Madison faculty, and by all reports has managed and manages the for profit/for science divide in a squeaky-clean, forthright manner. I'm sure he'll emerge from this flap good name untainted.

    But dang - I wouldn't want to be anywhere near the Perkins-Elmers boardroom when the dust from this finally settles.
  • You know, slashdot really needs better moderators. (i guess this will moderate me down then)

    How does a post this in depth and invloved get a rating of 3??? I've seen 12 year old remarks about beavis and butthead go to 5.. Bah...

    Moderate using your head!!
  • I don't have a problem with patents on new technology to make new discoveries any more than I have a problem with patenting a more efficient internal combustion engine. Sequencers (specifically the one mentioned in the article from the original post) are really just a more advanced way of interpreting an old sequencing technique:

    First, you partially chop up the length of DNA in question using commercially available enzymes. This produces a bunch of segments of different lengths which you then label with 4 different fluorescent tags (each color is specific for one particular base -- A, C, T, or G). You then load these segments into a thin, flat gel. An electric current is applied to the gel, and DNA (being negatively charged) moves toward the positive terminal (small segments move more quickly than long ones). Each segment, on its way to the end of the gel, is illuminated by a laser and the resulting color is noted by a detector. The sequence is then reconstructed by computer based on the colors passing through the detector in a specific order.

    The technique was first figured out in 1977 by Frederick Sanger (it's called the Sanger Dideoxy sequencing method). There's a similar method that works by base destruction described by Maxam and Gilbert around the same time. Big difference now is that you don't have to read the gells with their hundreds of little bands by hand anymore... and that's where the sequencers come in. Imagine sequencing the human genome by hand...

    Check out http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/faq/seqfacts.html [ornl.gov] for more information about sequencing techniques and the genome project in general.

    For the gadget geeks among us: http://www.pebio.com/ga/dna/377specs.html [pebio.com]

    (Too bad there aren't any prices there... the one that we had in my old lab was over $100,000 though...)

    The more disturbing trend to me is patenting the genes themselves... you can patent the camera that takes my picture, but don't patent the stuff that makes me me.

  • I'd just like to respond to the biological piracy thing. This has already happened. This is the reason why you can drink coffee. Coffee has long been a secret, very well guarded, until someone could steal some grains and export them. Then some plants were offered to countries as presents by the thiefs. So Dutchland, Spain, France, Britain, all ended up with coffee, and planted it in their colonies.

    So, coffee is already issued from biological piracy. And it will happen again.

    Btw, I juste browsed and "History of Coffee" will probably yield the complete story in any search engine, e.g. http://www.greenmountaincoff ee.com/scripts/history.asp [greenmountaincoffee.com].

  • Regarding this quote about Celera's advantage:
    Celera Genomics has certainly shown staggering drive. It has set 300 PE-made sequencers and some of the world's fastest computers to work 24 hours a day in an effort to be the first to map the genetic code. By contrast, the Human Genome Project moved painfully slowly before Celera's arrival forced it to step up its pace.
    If the Human Genome Project had a major distributed computing project (Like SETI@Home or Bovine RC-5) behind it to perform the sequencing, they could compete with Celera Genomics much better. This could be the ultimate "open-source" project, in more ways than one.

    Although I can appreciate the amount of expenditure that Celera Genomics is undertaking in order to complete this monumental project, it would still really suck if a commercial interest had intellectual property rights for the blueprints of Homo Sapiens.

    Does anyone know what kind of processing is required by this project, and indeed if the sequencing effort can be performed in a straighforward manner with distributed (as opposed to local or even parallel) computing?
  • The agument is about who owns the rights etc. to the sequencer, however Celera IS trying to get patents on the human genome. Guess that you get greedy bastards everywhere , not just in the big corps.
  • I think that if federal money, which comes from American citizens paying federal income tax, is used for scientific research, then it is only fair that American citizens be allowed to make free use of the results.

    It's not like no one has ever thought of this. For years, the government retained rights to results from government-funded research. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980(?) allowed universities to patent work arising from Federal grants. The idea was to encourage the work to be put towards practical ends, which the government was doing a lousy job of doing.

    Looking back, it's been a huge success. Believe me, the benefits you've had from what the American biotech industry has done for the economy far outweigh the benefits the old system produced for taxpayers. And then there're the benefits to health.

    Plus, as is the issue here, the government can demand discounts on patents they made possible.
  • This is insightful???


    Do AC's get moderator points nowadays?

  • Nevertheless, the technology which makes this possible (electrophoresis) was conceived, deployed, and commercialized by Applied Biosystems and Leroy Hood

    The standard reference for electrophoresis is a Laemmli paper from 1970. Of course, that was for proteins (predated the PCR techniques used in DNA sequencing). In 1977, Sanger et al extended electrophoretic techniques to DNA sequencing. Hood's been around since the beginning, but he's not generally recognized as the father of electrophoresis, no matter what the company pamphlet says.

  • Hello? The lame RSA patent was paid for on a U. S. Navy contract.
  • What's it going to take for us to recind the whole patent concept? Retiring Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, not to mention voiding all kinds of international treaties.
  • If I read this correctly, it states that the human genome will be complete in a matter of months? Think of the staggering uses for this, wow..

  • Patenting DNA mapping processes (Score:3)

    by kernelistic ( 160323 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @02:52PM (#1070851)
    Patenting should not be allowed in this field of research. Just imagine the consequences this could have if companies start patenting the various processes that are required to map DNA sequences. This would simply "not be beneficial"(tm) for anyone but the executives of the companies involved. Let's not have companies that work for themselves, but rather to further 'our' knowledge and help us solve our worldly problems. *That* would be a good thing(tm)!

    BTW, do I have First post? ;)
  • This is supposed to give federal agencies large discounts on their purchases of sequencers and input into how the devices are marketed
    I'm not a lawyer, so I'm wondering what kind of implication this has. How far would the government's pull in how they're marketed reach? Does this mean the government could have the say on whether or not other countries are sold the device (thereby stunting the research in those countries)? I wouldn't put it past Uncle Sam... does anyone know how much say-so the gubbment really has?

  • One step closer to Gatica =) (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Of course the government wants in! "If you've ever handled a penny, they've got a copy of you DNA on file. Why do you think they keep them in circulation?"
    It's a brave new world. =)

  • Patenting should not be allowed in this field of research.

    Actually, I think patenting this type of machine is pretty reasonable. If you're going to allow patents at all, this type of invention is exactly what they were intended for: complex machines with intricate designs that require long, expensive research and development.

    Now, if you're opposed to all patents, that's fine. But disallowing patents on devices used in biology doesn't make any sense and won't accomplish anything other than discouraging innovation.

  • I think it is a magnificent accomplishment to map the entire human genome. It really is a tribute to the accomplishments of science.

    --in the beggining the universe was created. This has made a lot of people really angry and is widly regarded as a bad move--
  • You want to solve worldly problems? Seriously?

    Fine. kill off 2/3rds of the world's population, and tell stupid people not to procreate. In adition, impede a 1 kid per couple limitation. And to those who say "life is precious, we should cherish it", bullshit. it isn't. at the very least, our view of "life" is scewed. A horse gets shot when it breaks its leg, while a human can't even be killed (out of its own free will) when he has like incurable cancer that's giving him excessive pain. 24/7. So don't lecture me about "how sacred life is".

    -m

    99 little bugs in the code,
    99 bugs in the code,
    fix one bug, compile it again...

  • I havea buddy that's working on something similar to thing by the name of rabani and UCSD. He was doing some crazy stuff with physics in a lab, but I guess these folks beat him too it. bill
  • Not really. The current push going on in the biotech world is to get a fast and dirty copy of the genome out there, thanks to the various gimmicks being played in the industry.

    So the "completed" human genome that comes out soon will be a buggy 1.0 release, in computer terms.
  • Hey there! I want to patent my own genes so that noone ever uses MY genes without buying a license from ME first!

    What should I do?
  • Not, true. There are some pretty strong techniques being developed specifically by physical folks that'll make DNS sequencing fairly trivial. It's revolutionary stuff to bio-tech folks, not for typical physic people. bill

  • Excuse me for sounding uninformed but what is Ditch Day?

  • My simple, ignorant view (Score:3)

    by Stephen VanDahm ( 88206 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @03:10PM (#1070862)
    I think that if federal money, which comes from American citizens paying federal income tax, is used for scientific research, then it is only fair that American citizens be allowed to make free use of the results.

    Of course, I'm sure that the issue is more complicated than that, but I think that the sentiment behind what I'm saying is a good one.

    Take care,

    Steve


    ========
    Stephen C. VanDahm
  • In any case, the patents expire and this one will too.

    Unless Congress extends their lives. As Congress recently did for copyrights. [harvard.edu]

  • The device that was patented, as far as I can tell from the story, was a device for reading genes. The genes themselves have nothing to do with the patented device.

    It is true that the Feds have rights in inventions they fund. No big surprise there. The key question here is whether the Feds actually funded the development of the patented machine. Given that the LA Times broke this story, and that I am an LA resident familiar with the quality of journalism exhibited by that fine paper, I would tend to believe the patentees.

  • >Seriously, who has the right to claim rights to the human genome.

    Unless I've missed something, the discussion is around patenting the process for sequencing, not the sequence itself. The analogy I've heard is like union carbide patenting the process for cracking long-chain molecular compounds into simpler compounds which can be sold commercially. Now, they don't own every molecule on earth that matches the ones they have been able to refine, but anyone who wants to produce "Chemical X" using Union Carbide's patented process would have to pay a license. (note, I'm not a chemist or anything so forgive me if I've mangled the terminology somehow)

  • Thanks, that was Interesting.

  • Super intelligent space monkeys! (Score:3)

    by fluxrad ( 125130 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @04:12PM (#1070867)
    I've seen this same view posted a few other times on this article..but what good's a /. account for if not to post.

    The human genome project should be a totally non-commercial project. This is a field of research that affects humans a helluvalot more than a car or a truck, or a TV for that matter. We're not talking about a pill you take to get a boner, or a bigger, better plane. We're talking about the building blocks of life. I think that should be given a little forethought...at least more than "Hey...we know how to build people now. How can we make money off this?"

    Oh well...i suppose this is just another type of ozone deal. We'll say fuck it untill it either starts to kill us...or we can't scrape any more cash out of the sun-burned bodies of our consumers.

    viva la capitalism! - what a joke!


    this post was brought to you by the national association for the advancement of owls.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Hrmmm.... I work for a company which produces a product that is the result of research done (mainly) by 2 scientists at a state university. Which would mean that federal money, and probably state money, was used to create the technology.

    The company, which is a spin off of that research group, owns patents on not only the product, but the technology used to create that product.

    Now, unless something has changed in the last few years, (quite possible, I don't try to follow anything as stupid as the law..), it would seem that this type of technology can be patented. (I certainly hope so, since I like my job =)

    This post purposefully obfuscated.
  • First off, the incentive for professors (and Universities) to engage in basic research has not always been, and need not be, to gain patents. Successful reseach == academic prestige for both the researcher and the Unioveristy. This pays off in many ways (in the professor's case, in how much he or she can command in salery.)

    My point was not that academia was uninterested in such grants, but rather that universities will not allow grants which maintain a stipulation that intellectual property belongs to the patent granting agency.

    Also, from the NIH web page

    2. WHAT IS THE BAYH-DOLE ACT AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

    The Bayh-Dole Act encourages researchers to patent and market their inventions by guaranteeing patent rights. This Act automatically grants first rights to a patent for an invention fully or partially funded by a Federal agency to the awardee organization. To obtain these benefits, however, the inventor and the organization have several reporting requirements that protect the rights of the Government.
    ------------------
    There is more at NIH [nih.gov], but the bottom line is that as long as you are up front with them, you retain ALL rights to your intellectual property. You can note that this holds for individuals and small businesses that are awarded grants, but not for larger corporations. And being up front with them is pretty important (you basically fill out a form that discloses the patent filing to them).

  • Well, the *idea* itself would fit "in the margin" as you say. Of course, it's worth pointing out that it's almost universally believed that Fermat did *not* actually have a correct proof for his famous Last Theorem. This is because there are many proofs of Fermat's Last that are simple, brilliant, and wrong.
    But anyway, the idea has been thought of before, and it has a lot of its own problems and generally wouldn't work. Unless... and that's the big part, the "unless", and whether that "unless" can be solved. I think it can.
    That clear it all up?

  • Wasn't the RSA Algorithm developed with federal funds, as well? IIRC, Government Agencies can use such an Algorithm free of charge, but anybody else can't.

    I believe that if any such thing is the case, developed using the taxpayers' money, then

    • the government shouldn't be required to pay licensing fees
    • individual taxpayers, and only individual taxpayers, should not be required to pay licencing fees
    • Corporate users should be required to license such a product for a nominal fee.
  • Instead of being a moronic Karma whore, why don't you read the fucking posts...many people have cited the official acts which give the patent rights to the universities...and not to all people. THATS the law...as much as you think you know what youre talking about.
  • If anybody is interested in a little bit of further information, check out the Smith group web site [wisc.edu] for a bit of background and a brief description of the sequencing process. Also, that biotech company is Third Wave Technologies [twt.com].
  • I think there is some confusion between mapping a genome and sequencing a genome. There definately is on my part. From what I understand sequencing is a lot more complicated than mapping. If someone could explain why mapping isn't as big of a deal as sequencing, I'd appreciate it.

    I asked my sister, a grad student at Berkeley, what the difference was. To be honest I got lost not too far into the explanation. "It's about as different as being able to look at a map and actually being able to get from point A to point B," she told me. At that point I started asking her questions about the Beowulf cluster they are building in her lab until she was totally lost--I hate being shown up by my little sister ;)

    numb

  • First, realize that the biotech world is full of pissing contests. Thus can a slow-moving government-funded sequencing effort suddenly speed up, in a (albeit futile) attempt to beat new competition from the the private sector. As a matter of fact, from the same company that brought them DNA sequencing (i.e. the electrophoresis method of analyzing DNA) in the first place.

    PE Biosystems (formerly Applied Biosystems, started by Leroy Hood of the article in question) has since before these events been the one player that has brought DNA technologies to the commercial world. Two years ago, the company launched the 3700 sequencer, for the first time providing throughput that would enable the sequencing of the human genome at the speed we have been witnessing lately. Initially, as part of the marketing campaign for this new instrument, we also started Celera Genomics, to actually do the sequencing and later sell the access tools to read the data.

    This has undoubtedly stirred up the sequencing world. The HGP suddenly realized that they needed to produce something, and now even Sun Microsystems has entered the race for the human genome. Hence, the pissing contest.

    Nevertheless, the technology which makes this possible (electrophoresis) was conceived, deployed, and commercialized by Applied Biosystems and Leroy Hood. We'll have to see what the courts say about the funding parts of this, but patents are normally awarded to the inventor, not the funder, in either case.

    Thus, although the sudden outbreak of this "news" undoubtedly is performed by those entities who want to "get back" at Celera (and in this world, there are quite a few of them, and yes, they are quite childish), it should have little or no impact as far as the awarding of the elecrophoresis patents etc. goes.

    I myself has received one patent in this area: A method for velocity-based normalization of readouts from the elecrophoresis process. Sure, some of the customers who fund our company are from the public sectory, but they are buying the machines, and not the rights to these patents.

    And no, neither I, PE Biosystems, or Celera are interested in patenting human DNA. These companies are <i>not</i> lobbying for it. As usual, the common belief that Celera is out to patent Human Genomic Data is just due to the slashdot effect (i.e. sensationalizing, gossip-mongering, etc).

    There may be companies that are out to do this, but they also realize it is a lost cause.

    So, all-fired-up-slashdotters - relax. Have a drink. Watch the show, and please reduce the noise level around here.

    -tor
  • >>Actually, I think patenting this type of machine is pretty reasonable.

    Not when said research is funded on the public dime. Then it is not 'reasonable' at all, it is corporate theft.
  • Haven't genes been patented yet?
    they're only tiny little things anyway, aren't they?

    and how do I go about patenting my precise sequence of genes? is it like the copyrighting process? do I need to post me to myself recorded delivery?

    and what about nature vs. nurture? can I patent the process of growing old and learning as well?
  • So? it's just a bigger lego brick. Why don't they work on something _useful_ like a decent followup to the Pixies?
  • so, like, who is held responsible when people start making genetically modified soldiers and terrorists?
  • I however will perform sexual acts for karma.
  • Big corporations have a bit more power than some though, and apparently more reluctance to use it responsibly as well. Picture the (off-topic) scene: Bill Gates IV sitting in front of his flowering windows-petunia in his back garden, finishes the changes to some code and starts it running. The output starts to whizz past and he freezes the screen to check it's working ok:- "A rose by any other name would smell as swees" Copyrighted, Microsoft (March 2120), OK "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" Error - couldn't copyright (#52 already taken) "A rose by any other name would smell as sweeu" Copyrighted, Microsoft (March 2120), OK etc etc
  • blakestah wrote:

    If federally funded grants had all their intellectual property public domain, then ALL of the monetary incentive for invention with federal funds would be gone.

    For some reason, that doesn't parse well. What you're saying is that there is NO monetary incentive in being given large amounts of money by the government.

    No, you are reading it too generally. I stated specifically that incentive for INVENTION would be gone. There is plenty of incentive for research without invention. But it has been my experience that inventions often just come about without much warning as a result of insight in an experiment. Would you rather create incentive for me to bury that insight until the granting period is over ?? Or take that insight outside the laboratory ?? To do so would likely compromise the entire purpose of the grant. There is no reason anyone would ever disclose an invention under a grant if they knew the invention would be public domain. Heck, it wouldn't even be worth the effort to write the patent - which in itself is not trivial.

    Intellectual property in the form of patents is due only to the INVENTOR. You get no credit for funding an experiment, although you MAY get preferred licensing. You cannot BUY invention. In corporations the patents are ALWAYS owned by the inventors, although once again the facilities providers will take control of licensing.

    That is a large part of the reason that government grants allow the patents of inventions disclosed as a result of grants. The contribution to society of the grant will be diminished if the government seeks to control the intellectual property. Universities will not allow grants with restrictions on patent licensing.

    You touch on other issues as to what is and is not patentable wrt the genome, issues that I did not address. I merely addressed the issue that government funded grants should have their intellectual property be public domain. Were that the case, they would not have any intellectual property. And in that scenario everyone would lose.
  • this story has no logic to it.
  • What, we can finally program stupidity out of the gene pool? I wish...

    -m

    99 little bugs in the code,
    99 bugs in the code,
    fix one bug, compile it again...

  • Lee Hood was always an exception ... (Score:3)

    by __aadkms7016 ( 29860 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @03:12PM (#1070885)
    As someone who was around the Caltech campus at the time the article describes, its important to note that Lee Hood was very atypical for a Caltech prof -- his lab was all post-docs and huge (at its peak, around 70 post-docs), this on a campus that has about 1000 undergrads and 1000 grad students, and maybe a few post-docs per group depending on the field. He was a much better fit for a big med school than he was for Caltech. Caltech ...
  • Anonymous reply. how unsurprising.

    -m

    99 little bugs in the code,
    99 bugs in the code,
    fix one bug, compile it again...

  • Fencing off the Intellectual Commons (Score:3)

    by LL ( 20038 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @04:21PM (#1070887)
    IMHO, this is just a specific case of business attempting to gain private benefits while socialising the negative externalities (ie public R&D). Basically R&D is high risk, as Paul Allen of Microsoft fame found out with his recently folded company. To help reduce the risk barrier, governments (supposedly representing the wider public interests) have traditionally funded broad fundamental science&technology, the well-spring from which the rest of consumer goodies spring from (computers from code-cracking, digital cameras from astronomy, etc). However, progress in this domain relies completely on a mindset devoted to honest introspection, intellectual integrity, and building on the work of others (idealistic shoulders of giants, etc). Hence the exemptions in copyright acts for review/reference, libraries, scholarly studies, etc otherwise the cost of research would just explode and we would probably have less of it.

    Now, I think it is fair to say that if a person or private company spends their own hard-earned savings on R&D, they should be entitled to any and all benefits that accrue (provided there are no excessive negative social/environmental impacts). If something is funded publicly from compulsary taxes, (much like a public forum), then it should be made available to the any emember of the public. Attempting to move from one domain to the other without 'fair' compensation smacks of 'rent-seeking' behaviour (ie a public subsidy constrained by persistant below-market valuation) as all the benefits are expropriated by late stage technology developers/marketers and not the in-between debuggers/testers. If you think about it, this refers to the Intel 'point of technology inflexion' where the value/cost shifts sharply upwards. A case in point is the internet name domain registration bun-fight since once people realised the potential growth of the internet name-space, then by capturing critical nodes of the registration pathway, they are able to extract monopoly rents (ie disproportinate rewards to risks). One analogy you could use to describe this behaviour is a village letting a field lie fallow to build up its productive base only to wake up one day to find one person has fenced off the best parts and cut off the water supply. Another analogy is that people like GNU/Stallman/Postel building the basic roads (internet standards) but others coming along afterwards and embracing/extending them by errecting toll booths (you can guess who). This type of activity (while very profitable to the individual), hurts the system as a whole as it discourages people with the time/talent to play with new ideas if someone else gets all the kudos (ie OpenSource desire for 'reputation'). On the other hand, if you're a believer in private enterprise and capital accumulation, then you'd argue that it is more efficient so I suppose it does depends on whether you are a people-oriented person or capital person). Of course to shift things from the public to private sphere takes strong will and Machievallian talents, something not always appreciated by others, especially competitors.

    Now what policy tools can be used to limit extreme anti-competitive behaviours (like the Geneva convention on war, you do need some *basic* guidelines to mark the playing field, uneven as it may be)? Traditional forms (or even definitions) of markets have not really evolved to handle pure intellectual goods. Part of the problem is that the US, as one of the more advanced ecnomies, has imposed its patent system (with all the systematic flaws and structured deficiencies intended to foster its early industrial economy) on the rest of the world (WTO, etc). For example, automation of business practices is a rather obvious result of computerisation, yet you have individuals attempting to gain a monopoly on entire sectors because they claim to be the first to codify it in VisualBasic or whatever (can you say Priceline?) even though the practice may already been implemented in parts/with variations/different combinations in other businesses but it wasn't worth patenting as it is something commonly done (there are only so many ways of pricing an auction). Patenting something just because it is nonobvious to the clueless is not a definition of innovation IMHO and the biggest stumbling block is sorting out the merely novel, as compared with the truely innovative is a major difficulty.

    The big problem comes in that most cutting areas of science nowadays are capital-intensive (think electron microscope, think supercomputer, think synchrotron), and this is a big big problem as governments are not particularly good at allocating capital (think bureacratic infighting over budgets instead of raising bonds/selling equity). Hence you need serious funding which governments are relunctant to do when there is no "obvious" political or socio-economic payoff (e.g. perceived supercollider boondoggle, etc). Hence their encouragement of "industry involvement" and the contaiminent of research ideals (for the good of humanity etc). This can be seen in other sectors such as medicine as privatised hospitals tend to discourage (or even abandon) their teaching role as profits (as traditionally defined) is dependent on patient throughput (easy to automate/accelerate) and not quality of care (very hard to measure).

    What is the solution? A lot of people would like to know. I suspect part of the problem is that our accounting system (which defines profit/loss) doesn't really measure the value of human capital properly. How does one measure the social value of a public university? More that just passing on learning (which can be obtained by reading a book), but the meeting of minds, moulding of motives, and mixing of memes? And more importantly, how do you provide technological solutions to problems which are inherently social in nature (e.g. fencing off intellectual commons due to entrepreneurial zeal without realising the unwritten rules of conduct).

    LL
  • Karma Whoring at its best! This was worth the wait.

  • Caltech == business incubator / v.c. fund (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Caltech (and harvard, mit, standford, etc.) are constantly using federal funds to create intellectual property - for the simple reason that its legal to do so (the Bayh-Dole act of 1980). Caltech even offers a course in how to do it - mit and stanford probably do too.

    The only homework in the course: write a business plan and submit it to caltech's venture capital investment and technology marketing office for review. Promising plans are put on the fast track for review by VC's. Students seem to acquiesce to this plan - despite the fact that the school really doesn't do much other than add a bureacratic layer that skims 5% equity right off the top of any deal, not to mention 75% of patent royalties. But since that's the kind of contract students sign when they enroll, there's little choice.

    There are numerous things that one might find questionable in this process - most notably how thoroughly screwed the "students" are - but its the way it works and its legal.

    The real question is, why are these "schools" --- when viewed as v.c. funds / incubators that book profits from investment and royalty income --- why is that these "schools" are not only tax-exempt, but they actually have easy and preferred access to federal handouts in the form of NIH / NSF funds?

    On the flip side, why doesn't, say, Microsoft (which, like caltech, has never paid a dividend to a shareholder) decide to start issuing PhD's and relabel its employees as "students"? Microsoft could then declare itself to be a non-profit school, stop paying taxes and start aggressively applying for NSF grants. Plus they'd be able to "hire" (enroll) people with J1 visas in addition to the H1 visas they now clamor for.

  • I can dispute that sequence (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. Pour grits into pants
    2. To boil grits, visit natalieportman.com [natalieportman.com].
    3. To reheat, repeat set 2.
  • i can't get to this article, which is obnoxious, as i am a biotech student. does anyone know of a mirror, or have a copy of this article saved that you could send to me? thanks- Rainwalker rainwalker@dr.com
  • 5/15/2000 8:34 PM
    Pablo Elbow CA (/.)
    While clicking the link is the story above, I got this:

    You don't have permission to access /news/science/science/20000514/t000045621.html on this server.

    Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

    Are we looking at the /. effect? a poorly configured server? Has the admin at latimes.com blocked the slashdot.org referer in an effort to avoid being /.ed?
    ___

  • The 1000g + 1000ug figure was all the students total at Caltech -- for maybe 200 professors or so, I guess. So, as a fraction of campus, his post-doc crew was about equal to about 7% of the entire grad student population. Since many of the research groups had no postdocs at all (our group had about 1 post-doc at any given time, and 6-8 grad students, and we were considered a bigger group in our department), his group was basically 10X the size of your typical large Caltech research group.
  • Am I mistaken (probably!) in my thinking that almost everything we use (especially /.ers) has had roots in a government/academic research program? For example: THE INTERNET!!! The Internet has become a major part of America's economy and daily life, and it was started by four universities and the DoD.

    Conversly though, the Internet is based on open standards, and it is still able to be insanely profitable. These DNA-easy-bake-ovens should be costly (I'm sure they're worth every penny), but the engineering (technological and biological) should be made public. This includes schematics on the hardware, and of course, the human genome.


    -------
  • The patent is for a gene sequencing machine, not the genome. They're not claming any rights to the genome of anything. They merely have a patent on a machine that does rapid DNA sequencing, useful in many fields.
  • Actually, I've discovered a real, rational, and feasible solution to virtually all the world's major problems. And it doesn't involve killing anybody. It's actually rather brilliant.
    Just thought you'd like to know.
  • 3com and Cisco were both born out of the University system (Standford I think?). They had labs on campus, had research funded and walked away with the IP. This is pretty standard practice.

    Universities want to make money. Providing a lab and some funding are pretty low risk in comparison to taking on the IP and marketing it. Why bother with that when you could simply fix the grades for some football players and get into a bowl game.
  • Hi!
    This was a good post, because there seem to be a lot of misunderstanding.
    You can't patent the pure sequence, this is what you said. What does the human genome project do then? Just sequencing and
    publishing doesn't keep anyone off from using this information, thinking about the amino acids some parts encode, and patenting it.
    This whole thing seems strange: All the biotech was developed with public funding and now some companies should be able to patent certain sequences? This can't work and I'm sure this will
    be corrected some day, i.e. only drugs can be patented which use a certain sequence for their effect.
    Kajetan Hinner
  • The data processing problems with the Sequencing part of the process are mostly data storage ones -- these sequencers just generate a *lot* of data and you need to keep track of it all.

    The real crunching comes during the Assembly process. This is where all of the fragments that were sequenced prett randomly (they call this Shotgun Sequencing for a good reason) are fed thru algorithms that take and try to reassemble all of the parts into the finished product like big jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don't really key in, but sort of overlap. So far the algoritms to do this realy on having an extrememly large contiguous memory space to be able to do this. I do know that they're hard at work on rewriting the algorithms to do this in a distributed manner but when you've got money to burn on throwing hardware at the problem what's the point? In any case, the HGP is already a sort of distributed processing setup -- labs all over the country are doing independent sequencing and then combining their data. Once their sequencing is done they'll then face the same problems as anyone else of needing to Assemble all of the fragments -- and this would be the perfect place for a distributed algorithm.

  • I thought that there was already a complete genome.
  • Referring to the capitalist versus people-oriented: Private companies benefitting from public research would not be a problem if we didn't already havea mixed system. In this particular case the company not only enjoys the benefits of public research but also private intellectual rights. In a purely capatilist system the company wouln't enjoy patent privledge. That is probably true of the people-oriented system also since in this case the public good of many companies using this technology would outweigh the single company's good. Under the present system we have the worst of both worlds. Capaitalists protected against people's rights/needs under a system created to protect the intellectual property of the individual.

  • I'm mostly on board with you, but...

    1. R&D which is publicly subsidized is a rare thing. Artificially inflated defense prices, and school research that is spun off into private interests come to mind. Companies don't have the luxury of being able to manage risk this way in general. Just pooling and options, baby. :)

    2. Fair use exemptions are derived from natural limitations to IP, and are a more doctrine than law. I don't _think_ that they were economically motivated...at least not at inception.

    3. Rents are simply returns on inputs. This isn't good or bad, just definitional.

    4. I'll leave dynamic network economy analysis alone, but there are actually some very cogent references available on these... I'll just say that what you say concerning degradation of standards and exploitation of common properties is sometimes true, though I would be very hesitant to actually point fingers (except maybe at MS). Where it is fairly easy to point at someone infringing the common property, it is often harder to show harm.

    5. Policy tools to limit anti-competitive behavior are blunt and inconsistent.

    6. Standard general and partial equilibrium economic models deal just fine with information goods. Information economies and network economies are just particular instances of traditional models. (God, who would I cite on this... probably Hal Varian from Berkeley. Carl Shapiro has also written some stuff on this. Do an amazon search- they are both good authors).

    7. Personally, I don't feel that the relative intensity of capital in development is nearly as important as the increasing rents on capital in contrast to rents on labor. But then I'm a bleeding heart that way. :)

    8. Regarding human capital valuation, I have to say that I'm in the camp that suggests that labor markets are generally monopsonistic. You can play with accounting rules all day long and won't see an improvement in the condition of labor until you can get a competitive labor market.

    I guess my big summary is : While a lot of what you say has some relevance and truth, I have yet to find an Economic analysis of a real life solution that doesn't begin with "It depends...". I believe that big G getting into It's R&D is the same kind of thing. I also believe (my point 1) that the actual numbers here are probably not very impressive in terms of GDP, and that we should focus on the real problem of intellectual property policy.

  • Microsoft, like caltech, hasn't paid a dime in dividends to a shareholder.

    And Caltech's shareholders are...? You know, I can't find Caltech's ticker on the Nasdaq...

    In a sense, Microsoft is a non-profit organization.

    And $6.5 billion US profit isn't really profit for Microsoft because...?

    Microsoft trains / educates an order of magnitude more people per year than caltech does - the only difference is the breadth of subject matter.

    So do other corporations, but training people in the corporate policies and giving them on-the-job work experience does not constitute a college education. I'm sorry if you cannot see the difference.

    Why shouldn't Microsoft start handing out computer science degrees?

    As soon as they offer a comprehensive 4 year acredited degree, I'd say they should. Of course that would require them to provide a rounded, comprehensive program, instead of on-the-job experience, as does any corporation who hires people.

    Of course following your logic, the furnature shop on the edge of town which provides on-the-job training making custom pine furnature should also provide 4-year degrees. After all, they do train on-the-job, don't they?

    A great deal has changed in the 12 years you've been gone from caltech; your vanity email doesn't mean you have a clue about what's happening now. One could go into specific examples - but then names would have to be named. And what's the point?

    Actually, the "vanity e-mail" comes from being a life member of the Alumni association, and in keeping some tabs as to what's going on with the alma mater. Frankly, aside from a slight increase by a small minority of students in getting rich over doing research--minor in that any student bright enough to get into Caltech can bypass the educational process entirely and strike out on their own--nothing has changed much. Caltech's policies manual (posted on-line, I checked) has not changed in it's wording one iota from the time I was a junior. And aside from Caltech trying to capitalize on a small (approximately 80) patent portfolio, the makeup of Caltech's financials has not changed one whit.

    Posting as an a.c. for a reason, einstein.

    'Cause you're a trid? dei
  • Yes, it's definitely reasonable. I think researchers would have a more cynical view of, well, research, if they knew they couldn't patent new processes or systems they had been developed. This goes back to an age old question... shouldn't developers/inventors/researchers be rewarded and recgonized for the progress they make? A researcher who cooks up some great, complicated device wants to be able to hold onto his creation, while still allowing others to use it.

    Anyone see parallels between this and the MP3 situation? Artists want people to see their work, but wish to retain "creative control" over it? Something to ponder...
  • Well,
    i must admit i prefer posts of signal 11 instead of yours. but thats just me offcourse.

    i tought karma was MADE to encourage people to write good posts, and not to juge about people being karma whores. so if signal11 wants to spend his time writing posts to get karma, who are we to stop him ?

    ok i ll shutup because this offcourse already has been said.
  • Remember, Microsoft's first product (Basic for
    the Altair, I think) was supposedly largely
    developed and tested on an emulator running on
    a government-funded computer at Harvard.

    Or so I've heard...
  • Ok, are they going to charge me a royalty for having DNA? How about $.01 per hydrogen bond. That should be enough money, huh.

    Seriously, who has the right to claim rights to the human genome. It could be deciphered in any lab and shouldn't be anyone's property. Just because I see interference fringes in a physics lab doesn't mean I own the property rights to light, thin slits, or mirrors. Physicists did not patent the nutrino when it was discovered, why should this be any different. Same goes for algorithims, but that's a whole new can of worms. Hhmm, RSA.

    Creations should be property, not discoverys.

    This pisses me off.

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