Bioperl: Re: Open Source and Bio questions

[Clay Shirky]

> That's an interesting theory, but remember that both MS and IBM are
> quite well and alive.

Oh sure - the change I'm interested in is not the demise of the old
but the rise of the new. 

> The point is that big pharmaceutical companies are simply outsorcing
> advanced technologies like gene distruction, comparative genomics, DNA
> chips to small or medium-sized startup companies because it is too
> expensive for them to keep the people trained and the labs well equipped
> with all the latest in genetic technologies.

So they're more like venture capitalists with really tight relations
with their partners, then?

> As far as I have seen from a brief experience, sequences are proprietary
> to whoever produces them (e.g Incyte or HGS) in the sense that you pay a
> fee to query the database, a (quite high) fee to get the DNA and
> royalties on the compound which eventually comes out from this. 

OK, so if they have sequenced, say, a bacterium I want the information
on, I can either a) pay for access to the database or b), resequence
it myself from scratch, no? I understand that with current technology,
the database access is the cheaper choice, but for how long? With the
$ per base pair figure dropping, whats to stop me from just
resequencing the data I don't want to pay for?

> this sense, I would say that Celera effort is a bit odd because the data
> will be publicly available anyway .. 

Thats whats bugging me too - if I patent a sequence thats also in the
public database, what do I own, or more realisitically, whjat
behaviors can I sue people over?

-clay

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