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Traditionally, there has been a blithe assumption that more innovation occurs when patents are granted than when they are not. But as T...

Here's a sad story , but not for the reason you might expect: Developing therapies from human embryonic stem cells is under threat in Eu...

Here's a perfect example of why intellectual commons should not be enclosed. The UK Postcode data set is obviously crucial information f...

One of the reasons I wrote my book Digital Code of Life was that the battle between the public Human Genome Project and the privately-funde...

Sir John Sulston is one of this country's - and the world's - heroes. Already a one-time Nobel prize winner for his work on worms (...

One of the most remarkable men around today is Sir John Sulston. He's already won a Nobel Prize for his work on nematode worms/apoptos...

Good to see an eminent writer getting it: It's not just that the idea of copyrighting an entry in the English dictionary, or someone...

Apparently : Although the idea of discussions on a Treaty on Access to Knowledge appears to have strong support in the African Group, Asian ...

It's happening , slowly: Novartis, the Basel, Switzerland, drug giant, has helped uncover which of the 20,000 genes identified by the Hu...

New Scientist reports : Linguists are calling for an online public database, similar to the human genome project, that would allow research...

The genome – the totality of DNA found in practically every cell in our body - is a kind of computer program, stored on 23 pairs of biologic...

It is done: the last unsequenced human chromosome - which happens to be the first in terms of size and hence numbering - has finally been &q...

One of the favourite games of scholars working on ancient texts that have come down to us from multiple sources is to create a family tree o...

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced the latest round of meg...

A new X-prize , this time for exploring inner rather than outer space, has been announced . To win the prize money, all you have to do is s...

My heart leapt last week upon seeing the latest issue of Nature magazine. The front cover showed the iconic picture of Watson and Crick, ...