Open research
Jun 11th 2004Wallabynerd alert
An article in The Economist suggests “open source” drug discovery, in which chemists, biologists, etc., work together online to develop (in their spare time, apparently) drugs for which the profit margin would be too small for pharmaceutical companies to be interested. Thus, cheap cure for malaria, or whatever. Yaaay! Initial funding for the “Tropical Disease Initiative” would come from (of course) the government.
I was with them up to this point, although the article overlooks little facts like that the computational tools are either commercial (with hefty price tags) or individual to specific academic/government labs, which are already using them pretty intensively. And that there’s already a website (Innocentive) that is sort of aimed at the same sort of thing, or at least could be. And that the pool of people able to contribute usefully to computational drug development, with the time and desire to do so, probably isn’t that large relative to the amount of work to be done on even one new drug candidate.
I was really struck (over the head, in fact) by this sentence:
Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale, imagines test-tube and animal studies organised in this manner, exploiting the “excess capacity” of graduate students and university labs, much as students and academics also contribute to open-source software development.
What “excess capacity”?? Law students (and professors?) may find themselves with “excess capacity”, but there’s usually more projects planned than there are students to carry them out… and the last thing I’d want to do at home in the evenings is take fancy expensive pictures of little things.
(Well, okay, I lied. A homemade spectro microscope would be really really cool. But it’d also run upwards of $50k – far upwards – which makes it a pretty expensive hobby. Now go compare that to the average commercial compiler/IDE/library/toolkit whatever at a couple thousand.)