Taking the trap off the mouse

Scott Shepard, The biotech debate: Share or hoard your findings? Boston Business Journal, September 22, 2006.  Excerpt:

Rob Williams believes there's a huge need for more open source biotechnology, where everyone can come to the well and fill their bucket.

Williams is a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. He is also director of the Complex Trait Consortium, an international effort to create a population of mice that mimics the human population when studying disease as well as drug reactions.

"The key concept is to recognize the areas of science and areas of industry that we all regard as pre-competitive," Williams says. "The question is: what is pre-competitive and should be out there in the public domain?"

Water, electricity and air are public utilities available to anybody who needs them. In biotech the same can be said for the Human Genome Project. Any scientist in the world can get the codes and apply them to his work. Likewise the new mice. Anybody who needs the mice can get them just by paying for the animals themselves. What gives the mice their utility, their genetics, is there for free exploration.

The scientific world has been slow to adopt Williams' mice, just because companies have been trained to believe that anything so useful can't possibly be free....