Information sharing will make scientific research cheaper. Shams Kazi reports

A small non-profit biotech research organisation in Australia is set to change the biotech industry. CAMBIA has found a new way of transferring genetic material to plants. It bypasses the heavily-patented agrobacterium transformation (AT) method. Researchers have placed this tool in the public sphere by distributing it under an open source licence called Biological Initiative for Open Source (BIOS). Any researcher or company can use the technology but is legally obliged to make new discoveries based on its use available to others. The patent-driven monopolistic biotech must rethink its business strategies. Sharing information is hardly a standard practice in biotech industry. Richard Jefferson, head of CAMBIA, says the plethora of patents surrounding the AT method made it difficult for researchers to develop countries to experiment in key areas such as agriculture. The developing world could only rely on products major patent holders sold. Sharing information, Jefferson says, empowers scientists across the wo
rld to create products more suitable for their societies. This is the basis of the BIOS initiative.

Along with a novel licensing arrangement, BIOS' website provides information on the patent implications of key technologies, and provides researchers with a platform to collaborate on finding alternatives, contributing to a resource pool of open biotech tools. Researchers can tap this pool without high royalty fees or legal hurdles. Research will now be available to all legally and cheaply.

Jefferson says research and development costs are high in biotechnology in the current system, but insists this is because information is not shared. "Innovation does not have to be expensive," he says. In the BIOS model, scientists work on problems in parallel. Thus, by making incremental development on a problem, innovation is more likely. To prove the system can work, he cites the success of the open source paradigm in the software industry led by a software called Linux.

He hopes that biotech businesses to can find new ways to make money using the global commons. The stakes in this industry are far higher. Life-saving drugs and hopes for improved crops are now denied to the poor due to 20 year long patent monopolies on new technologies.

The software community had a cultural revolution with the release of Linux that paved the way for a multi million dollar business that shuns monopolistic practices. The biotech community will also need a revolution in thinking if BIOS is to achieve critical mass. CAMBIA is trying to do just that: the word is Spanish for change.

- CSE/Down to Earth Feature Service