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Red Hat tries spreading open-source idea (News.com)
News.com
covers Red Hat's promotion of open-source science.
"Red Hat is taking a second crack at trying to spread its open-source philosophy beyond the realm of software development.
On Wednesday, the Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux seller announced a partnership with the nearby University of North Carolina to try to encourage use of the open, collaborative model in the fields of health care research, biotechnology, bioinformatics and public policy.
"The history of open source has taught us that the more broadly and transparently information is shared and re-used, the faster and stronger the results," Joanne Rohde, Red Hat's executive vice president of operations, said in a statement."
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Open-source Science?? Posted Apr 20, 2007 6:22 UTC (Fri) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] Strange--I thought that's how science was already supposed to be done...
Open-source Science?? Posted Apr 20, 2007 10:46 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] At least in some fields of medical research patents do serve a useful role: the time it takes to develop a medication is often around 10 years and the process costs much.
I'm not aware of ueful alternatives for that process.
This is not to say that all medical research is funded that way or should be funded that way. But an important part of it is.
Recall that the rationale of patents is to allow the researcher to expose the knowledge gained in the research and still make money for a limited period.
Medical patents Posted Apr 20, 2007 11:46 UTC (Fri) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] At least in some fields of medical research patents do serve a useful role: the time it takes to develop a medication is often around 10 years and the process costs much. Oddly enough, the pharmaceuticals industry is about the worst possible example you could mention of free-market capitalism in action. Consider the millions that went into the development of Viagra, versus the pittance spent on research into cures for tuberculosis and malaria. The latter kill millions of people every year, whereas I've never heard of a single fatality caused by erectile dysfunction. The problem is that TB and malaria are primarily diseases of poor people, who don't have lots of money to spend on a patented drug. Hence there's no money to be gained from saving their lives.
Medical patents Posted Apr 20, 2007 14:17 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] I did not mention "free market".
Let's ignore the millions that were spent on Viagra. Consumers got wht they wanted, and it was not funded with public funds. OTOH, there is much spent on research of all sorts of research. Not just Viagra.
Is there any actual research in Malaria? If it is so important, why do you not see goverentments and such research it?
Do I like it? No. But at the moment the it costs a fortune to get a medication tested, verified and authorised for use on humans. Patents are currently the most viable way to help fund this. Can you point to a better suggestion?
Medical patents Posted Apr 22, 2007 16:13 UTC (Sun) by JohnNilsson (subscriber, #41242) [Link] Can you point to a better suggestion?
Medical patents Posted Apr 22, 2007 18:24 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] ""Today it is already the public sector (henceforth called "the government") that pays for the bulk of all drugs that are used in Europe, thanks to various systems for universal medical coverage. (See for example page 37 in this report from EFPIA, The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.) It is the government that pays for the pharmaceutical research today, by paying high prices to the pharmaceutical companies for patented drugs.""
Haha. Such BS.
The government is the middle men and they get their 10-30% cut off the top of what goes to the people that actually do the work. They are like a leech. Your still dealing with the same orginizations, the same corporations, the same researchers as before. Now you just have the government telling them what to do.
It's not like putting the government in charge is going to get rid of the asshats that are currently screwing stuff up by being greedy. They aren't going to go around and fire execuatives or get rid of the corporations, are they?
It's a misconception that if you just get the government to throw money at a problem it will help it go away. It's similar to a PHB thinking that if they hire twice as many programmers (as well as implimenting a bunch of new rules and hiring more managers to make sure that the old programmers stop being lazy/corrupt) as they do now then the programs will get written twice as fast.
A big step towards solving drug issues is to eliminate the ability for these corporations to do advertising (which is just offensive and completely innapropriate) and also reduce the red tape and eliminating a lot of the liability with getting critical life saving drugs quickly to market.
Medical patents Posted Apr 27, 2007 19:12 UTC (Fri) by arch_o_median (guest, #44965) [Link] How about incentives? Bounties on those rogue actors causing us pain. I'm thinking of the X-prize model.e.g. $100,000,000.00 to the team that delivers Tuberculosis's head on a platter.
Or perhaps more realistically $10,000,000.00 or $1,000,000.00 to the team that achieves significant benchmarks in the quest for the whole enchilada...
Medical patents Posted Apr 20, 2007 19:15 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link] do you know what research lead to viagra?
it was being researched as a possible drug to improve circulation in people with heart problems. the side effects were discovered in clinical trials and marketing of the drug changed.
please Posted Apr 21, 2007 10:57 UTC (Sat) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] Please don't repeat this fairy tale from the pharmaceutical industry anymore. It's simply not true.
1. Pharmaceutical companies spend a multitude of what they spend on R&D on advertising. You can't really believe that they would save these 10-12% of their total expenditure and not have any new products anymore they can market.
2. Most new drugs are just a remix of old ingredients. A little fine tuning here and there. Most of the top selling drugs are really decades old. Please bear in mind that the pharmaceutical industry is not even interested in complete healing. They earn much more by alleviating and requiring constant medication.
3. The largest part of fundamental research is state-financed nowadays and happens at universities.
please Posted Apr 22, 2007 18:30 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] If they are blowing their money on advertising then a better plan would be to eliminate their ability to do advertising (which is just immoral in my opinion).
Problem solved.
It's not like putting the government in charge of these corporations is all of a sudden going to make them go straight. The same people will still exist and the same people will be in charge. Simply because they are the only ones that can do their jobs. If anybody else was able to do a better job.. then they'd be the ones making the money.
Instead of solving anything what will happen is just that they will divert their considurable advertising budget from TV commercials to focus on 'campaign contributions' and getting their own people elected and in positions of power in the government bureaucracy.
please Posted Apr 22, 2007 22:21 UTC (Sun) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link] there needs to be some way for the doctors to know that the new drugs exist and what they do, telling them about that is advertising.
how can that be immoral? keeping a new wonder-drug a secret from everyone would be far worse.
now these silly 'ask your doctor about X' commercials on TV are a bit silly, but I think it's better for information to be avalible to individuals, even at the cost of putting up with these commercials rather then effectivly telling people "you aren't trained to understand this, so we won't let you learn what your options are, just trust your doctor". no doctor can know everything, and an individual has a lot more time to research thing specific to themselves then the doctor has to research things related to any one patient. having patients asking the doctors 'what about X' is a good thing in that it serves as a check and balance for the doctors training.
Red Hat tries spreading open-source idea (News.com) Posted Apr 20, 2007 10:06 UTC (Fri) by roel (guest, #41887) [Link] For software written at universities or hospitals GPL would be best, but the supplier of funds isn't always concerned about the best of interests. Companies funding research want their money's worth and often oblige proprietary licences. Governmental funders, however, should rejoyce GPL, since it reduces the cost of research as a whole.
Red Hat tries spreading open-source idea (News.com) Posted Apr 20, 2007 16:24 UTC (Fri) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link] "Companies funding research want their money's worth and often oblige proprietary licences."
No problem.
Fund research and allow a Free license, tax break, require a non-Free license? No tax break.
all the best,
drew
Red Hat tries spreading open-source idea (News.com) Posted Apr 26, 2007 17:09 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link] My wife is a researcher in computational linguistics, and a common problem is that some scientists publish a paper claiming that the following sort of algorithm will have the following sort of results, and including the results, but their source code is not available.
If you then, as my wife has done, attempt to replicate their results by implementing the same algorithm yourself, you will of course find that you cannot. Perhaps there were bugs in their implementation, or perhaps they made improvements or modifications to their implementation that they forgot to mention in their paper. But most of all, the paper always underspecifies the algorithm, leaving open certain parts to be done in an "intuitive" way. Unless your intuition is identical to theirs, then you cannot reproduce their results.
Observing this pattern has led me to believe that scientific publications should require complete source code. To omit source code is simply to make your experiment non-reproducible.
Red Hat tries spreading open-source idea (News.com) Posted Apr 27, 2007 19:08 UTC (Fri) by arch_o_median (guest, #44965) [Link] The public sector life-science community gives lip service to open access. Unfortunately, in apparent contradiction to the ideals espoused, much of experimental protocol is closed-source (black-box).For reasons, which I won't bother to speculate on, it is not now the case that biologists need to publish the code used to process data. The resulting confusion is predictably great, and obviously avoidable. Check out a marvelous example of the damage this sort of opacity wreaks on scientific inquiry.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pentaretraction
{Currently the pdf linked to in the second hit.}
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