What is "open science"?
One of the topics that we have disussed in class this week was concerning open science. While I do not know a whole lot concerning it, after hearing some of the basics surrounding it I have developed some concerns regarding passing laws that make science as open as groups of people would want it to be.
Open science means revealing the secrets regarding your disoveries and inventions. It also means providing all of your process notes and details. By providing this it makes it possible for anyone who wants to be able to replicate your work and use it to their advantage.
At first thought, this might seem like a great idea, one that might help us advance in society with better medicine, greater inventions and so forth, but after pondering this and applying my background in business a quite opposite affect would occur.
Our Motives
When you go to a baker and purchase a loaf of bread, that baker sells you that bread because it benefits him and his family. The baker does not go to work and spend countless hours of his week making that bread simply so that when you need it he can provide it for you, he does it to make a profit so that he can survive. He may enjoy doing the work, but in the end it's all to churn a profit. And by doing his job, both he and you benfit in the transaction: you receive great tasting bread and the baker recieves money so that he can pay his bills and buy food for his family.
When you got to a doctor and he helps you, he is doing so not simply so that you are healthy, but so that he can earn a wage and support his family, just as in the baker example above. One of the reasons why he chose his job is because he enjoys helping people, but the roots of his reasoning for spending countless hours at school and developing the expertise to become a doctor was so that he could make money to pay his bills, feed his family, and survive.
Every single one of us, just like the baker and the doctor, does what we do to make money so that we can survive. Our motives are ourselves and our families.
Applying This to Science
Just as the baker and the doctor, scientists and engineers do the things that they do not simply to benefit society, but to benefit themselves as well. This is why people perfect their skills and become good at what they do: if the baker was a crappy baker then no one would buy his bread, and likewise if the doctor was terrible at his job then no one would go to him and he would be without money as well.When a scientist/engineer creates a process or discovers something new, he can then benfit form his labors and make a profit it by patenting his discoveries and using it to invent a useful product that will be sold for profit in order for the scientist to recooperate costs from his reserach and also provide a living for his family.
Let's say that you are a scientist and you create a new pill that benefits society. You have spent years and years of time, as well as countless dollars in order to develop the pill that you have created. Now what do you do? You patent your invention and you keep your secrets to yourself, and then you sell the pill to others in order to make a profit off of your hard work as well as recooperate your expenses for developing the pill. Is this evil? NO!
Open science would want you to divulge your secrets, reveal your processes, and make it possible for everyone to replicate what you just spent years doing. Why is this bad? Because in the long run you will not be able to make a profit off of your pill, and then you will not be able to gain off of your hard work. You may make a profit in the beginning, but after a few months other companies will begin manufactuing the same pill you devloped, which will flood the market with other brands, which will ultimatley drive the price of your pill down until you make zero profit.
If in the end you are not going to be gaining anything for your work, besides the satisfaction that you invented the pill, then there would truly be no motivation for you to devlop the pill to begin with. You have a yourself and you family to support, and doing science is costly. You would essentially be going into debt in order to receive gratification, but you will not be able to support yourself, your family, or recooperate the expenses you invested into developing the pill. In this situation, no one is going to want to develop anything. New types of good medicine and cures to diseases would eventually cease to exist. There would be not motivation to spend the time doing so. New invetnions would soon stop happening. People will stop inventing new technologies, and in the end our economy and our lives would digress. Our society would cease to progress without the incentives that money provide.
Patents, copywrite laws, and othersuch things are good for society. They motivate us to work harder, and protect our intellectual property. It motivates people to do better at what they do, and to develop better skills than anyone else. It helps society to advance, attributes to the reason why new inventions are created.
All of this assumes that people are self interested. This is true as a rule, but what if we can find certain groups that are exceptions? A lot of computer code writers just like writing code. They go to work and write stuff, and then come home and write their own projects without being concerned for gain.
ReplyDeleteThere's no moral imperative to be self-interested. In reality, society could work much better if people were less self-interested (though until that happens, we have the best system we're going to get.) Perhaps medicine is too costly to do for fun, but what about Open Source coding?
No, wanting to profit from one's invention is NOT evil. I understand that. However, there are a couple of points I'd like to make.
ReplyDeleteThe nature of a patent is inherently releasing enough relevant information that a competitor could reproduce the product. That's what a patent is. The Electrical Engineering department recently had a patent lawyer come in and this question came up--patents protect new medicines for a certain time, and the relevant laws (preparation to infringe) even make the transition to generics close to fair for the original company.
"Open Science" and "making a new pill" are actually quite different. See, a pill _is_ a massive effort--one lab may sequence a virus' genome, another may profile its mutation rate, and yet another may study the mechanism it uses to infect host cells. Restricting how these efforts can be combined might prevent a drug developer from synthesizing this information into a cure.
Once a cure is conceived of, a series of chemical processes have to be developed to mass-produce it--herein we find many of the big costs of development, and herein are the patent-protectable portions. The research community absorbs the rest.
Also, the research community and academic systems are funding- and reputation-based, rather than profit-based.