Crowdsourcing + Open Source: the Perfect Combination for Startups?

Crowdsourcing represents an interesting attempt to generalise the open source methodology to non-technical areas. The basic idea is to tap into the the vast store of knowledge and wisdom among the general population by providing a mechanism to funnel the best ideas to those who can build on them. Recently there have been some interesting examples in very different domains that suggest crowdsourcing is beginning to enter the mainstream.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Novartis Does Open Genomics

It's happening, slowly:

Novartis, the Basel, Switzerland, drug giant, has helped uncover which of the 20,000 genes identified by the Human Genome Project are likely to be associated with diabetes. But rather than hoard this information, as drug firms have traditionally done, it is making it available for free on the World Wide Web.

"It will take the entire world to interpret these data," says Novartis research head Mark Fishman. "We figure we will benefit more by having a lot of companies look at these data than by holding it secret."

The data and more information is available from the Diabetics Genetics Initiative site at the Broad Institute. (Via Slashdot.)

It's a Dog's Life

One of the fascinating things that I learned when I was writing Digital Code of Life is that many diseases - such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, certain kinds of cancers and neurodegenerative disorders - are not commonly found in the great apes. As I put it then:

In a sense, the human genome has evolved certain advantageous characteristics so quickly that it has not been debugged properly. The major diseases afflicting humans are the outstanding faulty modules in genomic software that Nature was unable to fix in the time since humans evolved as a species.

Another extraordinary fact is that dogs are even more susceptible to these same diseases than humans are, and for the same reason: the domestic breeds have arisen so recently, and from limited populations through inbreeding. But if dogs are like us, only more so, then they also hold out the hope that by investigating the root causes of their afflictions we might be able to understand our own better.

I see that further steps in this direction are now being taken:

Melbourne researchers are examining the DNA of dogs in a research project aiming at determining the genetic causes of common pet diseases – and to provide a model for combating diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis in humans.