Nobel Prize Winning Scientists Say Federally Funded Research Should Be Available Free Online

from the good-for-them dept

For many years, there's been a lot of debate over the fact that many scientific journals effectively lock up the results of federally funded research in expensive journals that are inaccessible to the public -- including many other researchers. Locking up useful research is troubling enough, but when it's federally funded, it's really problematic. Many scientists are quite troubled by this, and Glyn Moody points out that a group of Nobel Prize-winning scientists has now urged Congress to require federally-funded research to be freely available online. Really, they're pushing in favor of a new law, the The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009, which seems to make a lot of sense. If the government is funding the research, the more widely available it is, the better.

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Doctors Concerned About The Patenting Of Basic Science

from the seems-like-a-pretty-serious-problem dept

Joe Mullin has another excellent article looking at an important ongoing patent lawsuit, Prometheus Laboratories v. Mayo Collaborative Services, which looks at whether or not certain medical tests can be patented. As Mullin notes, it's a situation where patent system believers find themselves diametrically opposed to doctors, who feel patents on such things are a serious problem and harming patient health. Once again, what you see is a single entity trying to block out competition in an effort to gain monopoly rents, even if people are harmed in the process by not being able to get or afford important medical tests. And the biggest concern (especially among medical professionals) is the idea that you can patent counting something that occurs in nature:

"The patents are based on observations of the laws of nature," says David Herbert, chief administrative officer for Mayo Medical Laboratories. "We chose to make a stand." Such "observational" patents increase costs, slow innovation, and worsen patient care, he says. "It doesn't allow the test to be performed close to the bedside, and there's no ability to have second opinions."

The lawsuit is in the appeals court right now -- with a current ruling that the patents aren't valid for merely observing nature, though an earlier summary judgment found the other way. Still, this isn't just some random discussion on patents and copying. Lives are at stake, and doctors are pissed off at the ridiculousness of the situation:

"Physicians have longstanding obligations to advance and share useful medical knowledge with patients and physicians." Patents on basic scientific principles "threaten to stifle innovation and raise the costs of medical treatment." And claiming exclusive rights to "scientific facts," such as the correlation that Prometheus purports to own, actually harms research and personalized medicine rather than helping it, the doctors argue.

Hopefully the court realizes how dangerous such patents are for society (beyond just being ridiculous) and rejects them.

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50 Years Of Scientific Discovery & Sharing In Antarctica May End Thanks To Patent Greed

from the patents-against-peace dept

For the past 50 years, 47 countries have been a part of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which was used to establish Antarctica as a peaceful science outpost where scientists from many nations could work together and share their discoveries. And it may now all be coming to an end. Why? Because (as Will Klein alerts us) all this discovery and sharing is going on mostly without patenting! This has greatly upset a bunch of companies who want to hoard any such discoveries and want to be able to patent "Antarctic organisms or molecules." Beyond the rather serious question of why either organisms or molecules can be patented, this is a microcosm of what's wrong with patents. Patents are supposed to be used to encourage research (promoting the progress, remember). And this treaty has done a great job promoting progress without patents. As the article notes, products already "derived from Antarctica include dietary supplements, anti-freeze proteins, anti-cancer drugs, enzymes and cosmetic creams." In other words, all of that happened mostly without patents. The only reason to break up this treaty, stop the sharing, and start allowing patents is to slow down the discovery, hoard the results and limit the progress to single companies who get a monopoly on that work.

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Turns Out Virtual Worlds Teach Players The Scientific Method

from the well,-how-about-that dept

With so many articles trashing video games all the time, Clive Thompson (who continues to consistently write the most interesting articles for whatever publication he's writing for at the time) has a report about a new study that notes that kids playing virtual world video games are basically learning the scientific method, without even realizing it. That is, in order to achieve certain goals and milestones, groups work together to put forth a hypothesis and data on how best to tackle a problem -- and then when it doesn't work, they regroup, and change the hypothesis based on the new data. In fact, the research found that when looking at forums discussing the games, rather than a bunch of juvenile trash-talking (though, there was some of that too), much of the conversation would mimic the process of scientific discovery and understanding:

Someone would pose a question -- like what sort of potions a high-class priest ought to carry around, or how to defeat a particular monster -- and another would post a reply, offering data and facts gathered from their own observations. Others would jump into the fray, disputing the theory, refining it, offering other facts. Eventually, once everyone was convinced the theory was supported by the data, the discussion would peter out.

The researcher then takes this a step further, suggesting that one way we could revive sagging science education in this country is to embrace this aspect of video games, and get students to recognize that what they're doing is the basic process of scientific discovery, so that they don't think of science as being boring and irrelevant to their lives.

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