From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Sun Mar 19 2000 - 19:51:52 MST
Timothy Bates wrote:
>
> on 20/3/00 10:00 AM, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> > Look at this one guy who employs a handful of people and has
> > his own supercomputer. He's beating the pants off of the government
> > people in decoding the genome, and because the government hates being on
> > the losing end, is now trying to socialize his results.
>
> Point A: He is not beating the pants of "the government"
> Firstly, it is not the government, but a mixture of
> government, philanthropic, and pharmaceutical money.
>
> Secondly, "The government" have gotten about as far as
> Venter, arguably further, as PE Corp has a bunch of fragments
> which they _may_ assemble first, no one knows.
a) the government project has been at it for ten years. Venter started
two or three years ago and has already sequenced the fly genome, which
shares about an 80%+ commonality with the human genome, and will finish
the human genome one or two years before the government project, and at
a cost that is a small fraction of what the government has spent. I'd
say thats beating the pants off of them.
>
> Point B: In my humble opinion Venter is being granted ownership to
> information which is not for sale. I own it already. And so do you. I am not
> selling. Therefore I do not want the government (who is trying via their
> patent officers) to steal my ownership rights and give them to Craig Venter.
The human genome is something that I do agree all human beings share an
equal ownership in. The government apparently has no intention to give
Venter any patent rights at all, and is pretty pissed that he's making
them look like idiots. Considering that any government information that
isn't classified for defense purposes is required to be made available
to everyone freely, the government is breaking its own law by refusing
to provide Venter (who is one of us) with any of their own results. Not
only that, but they are trying to get Venter to share his results
without any sort of propreitary use agreement. When he balked at this,
they got all huffy and started making him look like the bad guy.
So far as I know, all Venter is interested in doing with the genome
information is to package it and sell it to other researchers. The fact
that he added value to the information by actually sequencing it is the
value and investment he has a right to a return on. He has no problem
with other companies doing their own sequencing and selling that
information. What he has a problem with is other companies getting for
free his results that the government wants him to provide to them. As
far as I am concerned, he is totally justified.
>
> He is not patenting innovative medicine, or proteomic interventions, or even
> _functional_ variants on the genome.
he isnt trying to patent anything that I have heard.
>
> Instead, he has filed patents on thousands of _fragments_ of code. Raw code.
Since when?
Mike Lorrey
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