From a long in-depth interview at The Edge, with Drew Endy, who is Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, and which reviews 30 years of progress in ‘engineering biology’.
The start of the conversation has the following significant quote:
“the biosecurity framework needs to recognize that it’s not going to be nation-state driven work necessarily, how an ownership sharing and innovation framework needs to be developed that moves beyond patent-based intellectual property and recognizes that the information defining the genetic material’s going to be more important than the stuff itself and so you might transition away from patents to copyright and so on and so forth.”
Drew Endy continues:
“The Open Source world is one thing; if you’re trying to invent a language for programming DNA, having a proprietary language seems stupid. If Oxford University had supported privatization of the English language hundreds of years ago, the dictionary they made wouldn’t have been so useful. And so to a first approximation, there’s going to be a core collection of standardized genetic objects that can define families of languages people can use to program DNA. And those have to be made a public resource.
This will be a big transition from today. Biotechnology today derives investments from business models that support the exclusive application of different biological functions for a very small number of problems. For example, there are wonderful companies that have locked up most of the relevant intellectual property around how to engineer proteins to bind DNA. The products that they can deliver are going to be measured in small positive integer numbers, a few diseases.
But, the real value associated with being able to engineer proteins that bind DNA are in the uncountable applications people could use the proteins for. It’s like a programming language where it would be a big downstream economic cost if you owned “if/then” and you were the only person who could use it. We need to be able to reuse this stuff in combination. Note that the ownership of biotechnology will play out in a landscape that is surfing along a technology transition where, as automatic construction of DNA gets better and better and better, you’re going to care less about the specific material you have, you’re going to care more about the information on a computer data base and the computer design tool that lets you organize that information, compile it down to a DNA sequence, and print it. As soon as you start to manage information, all sorts of new ownership, sharing and innovation schemes become allowable.”
For more information, see our entries on:
– Open Source Biology and Open Source Biotechnology
– the work being done on open licenses for science
– An Open View audio conversation with David Lipman on Open Science and Biology
We cover open/free, participatory, and commons oriented developments in Science here.
The parasitic actions of genetic profiteers such as Monsanto, Nestlé, Sime Darby, ConAgra, etc. have been LOCKING life’s potential CLOSED for a long time now.
Terminator(TM) technology, and more recently with http://www.TransContainer.wur.nl described as “Developing efficient and stable biological containment systems for genetically modified plants.”
http://Grain.org/hybridrice/?lid=198
Profit requires dependence. The consumer must be dependent upon the source owners. Wage has no such requirement.
if you’re trying to invent a language for programming DNA, having a proprietary language seems stupid.
Stupid? You think profiteers are stupid to make something proprietary? Clever; vicious; insideous; dangerous; yes, but not stupid.
“If Oxford University had supported privatization of the English language hundreds of years ago, the dictionary they made wouldn’t have been so useful.”
Profiteering corporations don’t want products to be useful. Usefulness is bad for profit because the consumer becomes more “set up”. A profiteer wants a consumer to believe the product is useful so it will be purchased, but after that the product should be “self destructing” or limited by time or in other ways so the dependence remains.
“there are wonderful companies that have locked up most of the relevant intellectual property around how to engineer proteins to bind DNA. The products that they can deliver are going to be measured in small positive integer numbers, a few diseases.”
All the better to subjugate you with, my dear.
“But, the real value associated with being able to engineer proteins that bind DNA are in the uncountable applications people could use the proteins for.”
Value? BWA-HA-HA-ha-ha! You think abundance is value? Abundance is WORTHLESS to a profiteer. In fact, it is worse than that, abundance is INVERSELY related to profit. As abundance increases, the potential for profit decreases. Profit for some measures the poverty of others.
“It’s like a programming language where it would be a big downstream economic cost if you owned “if/then” and you were the only person who could use it.”
Sure it is a cost for everyone except the profiteering source owners. That proves profit is an externality for the consumers that suffer it. It is a measure of their dependence; a plea for growth.
Profit is not needed by a society, it show how far we are from having the sources of production fully distributed. This is easily solved by treating all price above cost as an investment from the consumer that paid it.
Until we organize in a manner that respects a consumer’s pleading, the ignorantly divisive profiteers will continue to murder/delete all useful species while replacing them with those that will guarantee dependence to insure profit remains.