The Great Prize: Innovating Without Monopolies

Last week I was in Brussels, talking at the European Parliament - not, I hasten to add, talking to the Parliament. This was a more intimate gathering in one of the smaller (but still quite large) conference halls, discussing a rather interesting matter:

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Healthiest Kind of Commons

Creating a commons is all about sharing, and there can be few areas where sharing is more mutually beneficial than health. After all, everyone aspires to good health, and the best way to get that is to pool what we know. Surprisingly, that doesn't happen as much as it could at the moment, because antiquated ways of looking at medical knowledge - shaped by pharmaceutical companies - try to enclose as much of the commons as possible.

Happily, others are fighting that tendency. Here's the latest manifestation, called the Health Commons, from the same bunch of idealistic nutters that brought you the Science Commons:

Health Commons is a coalition of parties interested in changing the way basic science is translated into the understanding and improvement of human health. Coalition members agree to share data, knowledge, and services under standardized terms and conditions by committing to a set of common technologies, digital information standards, research materials, contracts, workflows, and software. These commitments ensure that knowledge, data, materials and tools can move seamlessly from partner to partner across the entire drug discovery chain. They enable participants to offer standardized services, ranging from simple molecular assays to complex drug synthesis solutions, that others can discover in directories and integrate into their own processes to expedite development — or assemble like LEGO blocks to create new services.

The Health Commons is too complex for any one organization or company to create. It requires a coalition of partners across the spectrum. It is also too complex for public, private, or non-profit organizations alone - reinventing therapy development for the networked world requires, from the beginning, a commitment to public-private partnership. Only through a public-private partnership can the key infrastructure of the Commons be created: the investments in the public domain of information and materials will only be realized if that public domain is served by a private set of systems integrators and materials, tools and service providers motivated by profit. And in turn, the long-term success of the private sector depends on a growing, robust, and self-replenishing public domain of data, research tools, and open source software.

Good to see open source being mentioned explicitly here: it does, indeed, form the basis of all these commons efforts, because it provides a completely flexible infrastructure that is also completely free.

Open Source Drug Discovery

There's something utterly perverse about the way new drugs are developed. Pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions - sometimes billions - of Euros investigating vast numbers of new compounds in the hope that they might treat a particular disease. If they find one that works, they then have to test it extensively for side-effects and the rest. Moreover, most of the negative knowledge they acquire - what doesn't work - is wilfully thrown away, since it represents "competitive" information.

But how about turning things on their head? Instead of trying millions of new substances for one disease, how about experimenting with the tens of thousands of known, safe medicines in the public domain on thousands of diseases? Like this:

The Johns Hopkins Clinical Compound Screening Initiative is an open-source effort to collect and index more than 10,000 known medications and determine which of them are also effective against hundreds of low-profile, Third World killers, such as Chagas disease, cholera and leprosy. The library will function something like a Wikipedia of drug discovery, where scientists around the world can contribute to the database and even provide samples or screen drugs themselves, thereby saving millions of dollars on R&D.

This could save millions of lives. Just one problem: nobody gets obscenely rich in the process....

Google: Evil Costs Extra

"Don't be evil" is Google's motto. Perhaps they need to amend that to "don't be evil unless it's really profitable" in the light of the following:

The New York Times calls Sicko a “cinematic indictment of the American health care system.” The film is generating significant buzz and is sure to spur a lively conversation about health coverage, care, and quality in America. While legislators, litigators, and patient groups are growing excited, others among us are growing anxious. And why wouldn’t they? Moore attacks health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst. Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care.

The healthcare industry is "money and marketing driven"? Surely not.

But don't worry, cuddly old Google has the solution to this wicked insinuation:

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.

Now that's what I call sicko....

Update 1: Feeble attempt to undo some of the damage here. Alas, entropy and nursery rhymes remind us that the egg of integrity, once broken, cannot be put together again.

Update 2: Oooh, look: hypocrisy, too.

Update 3: Google slowly gets it.

A Nobel's Noble Words on the Pharmaceutical Commons

Great piece in the BMJ excoriating greed and stupidity in the pharmaceutical industry:

It is hard to see how the patent issued by the US government for the healing properties of turmeric, which had been known for hundreds of years, stimulated research. Had the patent been enforced in India, poor people who wanted to use this compound would have had to pay royalties to the United States.

And:

In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed.

History will not be kind to those behind this disgraceful state of affairs. (Via Slashdot.)