Today's Bio-hacker Heroine, Tomorrow's Hope

There are so many threads here:

What could be a life-saving breakthrough in the fight against cystic fibrosis, cancer and AIDS has been achieved by a 17-year-old Indian-American student at the Mississippi Institute of Mathematics and Science.

...

the young scientist turned to Ayurvedic medicine. Madhavi, who was born in India, spent a great deal of time watching her grandparents, who were practitioners of the traditional Indian healing techniques. "I grew up learning a lot of that," she recalls. "They've used it so much that I know it has some effect. They wouldn't have used it for centuries if it didn't. So I decided to try that approach, and it worked."

...

While Madhavi could become a millionaire by patenting her work, she has something else in mind: making it openly available. She points out, "If I were going to patent this, the rights would have to be sold to a pharmaceutical company, and that would greatly increase the cost of the drug once it's developed. So to prevent that from happening, by publishing it, the information becomes readily available and any company that wants to manufacture it, would be able to. So the price would be much lower due to competition and the people who need it most will have access to it."

There is the young bio-hacker, blissfully unaware that what she is doing is hard; there is the ancient medical commons, used, not plundered; there is an understanding that patents, that should open knowledge, often lock it up; and above all, there is a compassion and altruism that gives us hope for the future.
(Via Technocrat.)

OA and Collectivisation

PLoS Medicine has put together a timely collection of some of its articles on HIV infection and AIDS. Nothing remarkable in that, you might say. But in principle it could have put together a collection of such articles drawing on other open access titles too.

Indeed, I predict this kind of collectivisation will become increasingly popular and important as OA journals gain in popularity. Because this kind of meta-publishing is only really possible in an OA world: traditional publishers would usually rather pull their own heads off rather than allow other rivals to use their texts.

Of course, you might point out that these same publishers will be able to include OA materials in their own collections, whereas PLoS, say, won't be able to draw on commercial titles. But that's fine: it would be an implicit recognition that OA journals are the equals of traditional titles, and would provide buckets of free publicity.

That's the great thing about openness: even freeloaders help the cause, whether they mean to or not. (Via Open Access News.)

Bill Gates Wants to Share "Openly"

It looks like Bill Gates is one step closer to getting it. According to this press release from his foundation, regarding a major research grant to create a series of research consortia to accelerate HIV vaccine development:

These consortia will be linked to five central laboratories and data analysis facilities, enabling investigators to openly share data and compare results, and allowing the most promising vaccine approaches to be quickly prioritized for further development.

...

As a condition for receiving funding, the newly-funded vaccine discovery consortia have agreed to use the central facilities to test vaccine candidates, share information with other investigators, and compare results using standardized benchmarks.

In other words, Gates is demanding open data sharing, and maybe open access too (it's not clear yet, as Peter Suber notes).

But this is a slippery slope, Bill: once you accept the inherent efficiency of sharing data "openly", as the press release emphasises, it's only a short conceptual leap before you find yourself accepting and then encouraging the other ways of sharing stuff "openly"....

In the Vanguard

What is exciting about this piece in the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard (link from Open Access News), is that it puts all the pieces together so well: how open source and open access relate to intellectual property regimes, AIDS, poverty, ecology and - inevitably - global politics.

As the article concludes:

Open the source code of innovation, and we’ll change the planet.

Truly, the way forward.