Open science
I’ve nearly finished the book The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford1. It’s a very involving book, and beautifully written. Francis Spufford manages to explain some rather complex concepts in a simple and engaging way, without ‘dumbing down’, and he captures the characters of the people involved very well.
The chapter on the British Rocket programme (‘Flying Spitfires to Other Planets’) was very interesting, and I won’t quickly get rid of the image of Ray Dommettâone of the main people involved in Britain’s nuclear defence programmeâtaking part in Morris dancing in his spare time:
Another of the rocketmen I talked to spotted him by chance in Bristol. ‘These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladderâand I said to my wife, “Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”’
I also liked the chapter on the Human Genome Project, ‘The Gift’. It’s also an important story. For those who don’t know the background, in 1998, a consortium in the US (later to be called Celera) fronted by Craig Venter announced that they would be forming a private company to take over the sequencing of the whole of the human genomeâa task that had been started by various labs funded by the National Institute of Health in the States and by the Medical Research Council and The Wellcome Trust in the UK. They were going to throw huge resources at it, and aimed to finish the sequence two years or so earlier than the projected public effort completion date. The real stinger was that they weren’t going to make the results freely available to scientists, but to charge a subscription fee for access to the database.
This didn’t sit at all well with many scientists. Not only did it seem, wellâjust plain immoral to have the most fundamental fact about us as a species under the control of a private company, it was also likely to be very damaging to the progress of science. As individual scientists, our progress tends to be measured in nanometres, but it’s when we find links between our own work and those of others that things start to move along a bit. Out of necessity, we study biology in neatly defined and bounded boxes, but life itself tends to sprawl messily over the borders. So it wasn’t just about the money; if we couldn’t easily make connections with other scientists working in other areas, we would be severely hampered. Those with access to the Celera database would be under a contractual obligation not to divulge the information to those who were not subscribed.
Thankfully, things turned out rather well. A group of dissenters, lead by John Sulston and Michael Morgan, stepped up their own public access efforts, funded very generously by the Wellcome Trust in the UK. They managed to keep pace with Celera, and by releasing their chunks of completed sequence each day they made the data produced by Celera commercially worthless. Looking back, it seems as if this was an important turning point, not only because of the importance of sequencing the human genome, but also because it made clear the dangers of the increasing commercialisation of science.
There has been a slow but steady rise in the number of voices supporting the ‘open sourcing’ of science. The Open Access movement is gaining ground, and we now have an Open Access and freely distributable journal, Public Library of Science (PLoS). The Creative Commons organisation has recently launched Science Commons to make it easier for scientists to allow public access to their work, while maintaining some control over it. It could have easily gone the other way.
1 Thanks to John for the excellent recommendation.
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I'm glad you enjoyed Backroom Boys.
I found the chapter on the HGP particularly interesting because, like the chapter about the process of figuring out how to roll out a national mobile phone network, it was a subject I knew relatively little about. I had read bits and pieces about the race with Craig Venter's company, but hadn't realised how far the impetus for a publicly-funded effort had come from scientists closely involved in the field, as opposed to EU governments making a conscious strategic move to block US dominance of an important technology (as with, say, the current Galileo programme which is intended to compete with the US GPS system.)----- Oh, my - that's not the way I remember the genome project at all, I'm afraid. Maybe I'm too cynical in my recollections, or maybe the view from the US was just different. I was working for one of the (US) genome centers until shortly before Venter made his announcement. What I remember most is the very, very leisurely pace of sequencing before that point. The primary arguments were over how much accuracy was required in the released data, and whether another decade was too soon to finish the project. Very little work was being done on sequencing technology or methodology, and a lot of effort was expended on winning funding away from competing genome centers. In general, the picture was of people riding the gravy train and not wanting to upset anything too much. Of course, sequencing more efficiently wasn't encouraged, because having more headcount meant a more important project center. Things may have been otherwise in the UK.
Meanwhile, biotech companies in the US had developed better sequencing processes than the public efforts were using (more work accomplished, better, with many fewer people). Several companies (Incyte, for example) had extensive private sequence databases to which they sold access, so Celera wasn't proposing anything especially new, just larger and therefore more valuable in the short term. As for 'owning' the genome, that was never their stated intent, and never possible. They did intend at first to use their own data to find useful, patentable information - which proved commercially unworkable, since they'd be going into direct competition with their customer base.
After Venter's announcement, figures in the US Congress (and elsewhere) wanted, naturally enough, to know why their people were saying it would take 10 or 20 years to do what Venter said he could do (and did) in one. Much of the anger at Venter seemed to be because he'd made a lot of people in the public genome community look silly, venal, or incompetent. OK, and in the private biotech community a lot of people were angry because ABI (Celera's parent company) had free access to every significant private effort in the world as a service company, and then went into competition with its customers. I don't recall anyone making the argument at the time that it was immoral for Celera to collect data and sell it; I do remember the genome community responding well to the kick in the pants it got from Celera.
by Victor @ 17/01/2005 4:02 pm • Permalink •
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John: Yes, the chapter about the mobile network was good too, and the one about Elite made me very nostalgic
Victor: Interesting to hear the other side of the story. I suspect that the view from the US was different; despite being a biologist, genomics isn't my field, so I was going on the interviews in the book with Sulston and Morgan (Venter wasn't interviewed, so we don't get that side of the story), and what I remember of the reactions of my colleagues at the time. Actually, I think this highlights an interesting cultural difference between the UK and the US (which is also very clear in the book). Since the Second World War, we've more or less lost our position of power and influence in the world (personally I think this isn't an entirely bad thing...). Science and engineering has generally become poorly funded, and as a result, people have adopted a different approach, with small teams focussed on doing as much as they can with as little as possible.
I get the impression (though I may be wrong about this) that in the US, big, glossy endeavours with huge teams and slick, professional personnel are highly regarded, but in Britain there's a certain amount of distrust of this kind of thing. We have great affection for slightly eccentric, small scale, battling-against-the-odds stories. So, for example, there was an enormous amount of affection for Colin Pillinger (with his mutton chop whiskers and farmer's appearance) and the failed Beagle 2 mission, whereas people here were slightly scathing about the successful NASA rover missions. Note that I'm not saying that this is sane, fair or reasonableâit's just the general mood. We love people who fail heroically (see Tim Henman)!
Having said all that, I'm still very glad that it turned out the way it did, whatever Celera's real intentions. I'm sure that you're right that Celera delivered a kick in the pants to the public genome effort: I know that the British effort was pretty ponderous (and badly funded) before the announcement and the Wellcome Trust's subsequent intervention.
by bsag @ 18/01/2005 6:02 pm • Permalink •
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