The Opening of Biotech

RockinRobStar writes "ABC Science have posted an article about an Australian geneticist, Dr Richard Jefferson, pushing for "free access to the scientific tools of modern biology and genetics...just as computer programming tools were shared in the open source software movement." "The scientific tools...would be licensed under a similar agreement as the general public licence". Dr Jefferson plans to present his program to the World Economic Forum in January."

ha...

Dr Jefferson plans to present his program to the World Economic Forum in January.

... and maybe get laughed off the 'stage' by all the money-making politicians/whatever, most likely. They want ways to make money, bear no illusions.

Re:ha...

Won't the current pantent laws, as they apply in most Western countries, take care of this?

Free Software needed the GPL (or the BSD License... Let's not start up that Holy War again) because software is usually locked up by copyright, and copyright lasts a long time.

Genetic research usually results in patents, though.

Patents give researchers a few years to make "ph4t l00t" as a return on their investment, and then lapse into the public domain. It's a pretty good balance between incentive for research and sharing of knowledge. What exactly is the problem here?

Oh Christ that's scary.

Just because something can be done doesn't mean something should be done.

Re:Oh Christ that's scary.

Well maybe I'm just the kind of guy who says 'The cup is half full of terrorists!'

It's amazing what we can do...

When we all work together. Like momma said, "Share your toys". Even when your toys are information and software. ~D

Uhoh

free access to the scientific tools of modern biology and genetics
I just had a debate about this a mere 30 minutes ago, what with all the cloning etc going at the moment, this isn't always a good thing. I think the information the public at large get should be carefully monitored. We wouldn't want people being able to clone themselves at home.

Re:Uhoh

What?! My licence specifically says that I am allowed to make one (1) copy of myself for off-site back-up.

Re:Uhoh

We wouldn't want people being able to clone themselves at home.

Why not?

Maybe I'd think you had a point if you were talking about home genetic engineering, or if we had tubes where you could pump out backup copies of yourself like in a Governor Arnold movie, but cloning is just cloning. There's almost no issue there, besides whether cloning causes health problems in the clone. I can make my own Prozac with less expertise and cheaper equipment than I'd need to clone myself, and nobody's up in arms about that.

Everybody goes on about how cloning is a moral crisis, without ever pointing out exactly where the crisis is. Rich people cloning themselves? They do that now, they just use somebody else's DNA to help. Overpopulation? How is a screaming food-hole that's genetically identical to you any more appealing than a screaming food-hole that's only 40-60% genetically identical to you? Cloned soldiers? That's a movie, if you're going to form an army of brainwashed-from-birth psychos, cloning isn't going to help you very much. Other than the fact that we're playing God by shockingly inserting on our genetic material into an egg cell in order to reproduce manually rather than leaving it to a chemical reaction, I don't get the shock and horror.

I understand not wanting to clone people until we can figure out whether or not you end up with a genetically diseased baby, that's reasonable and absolutely necessary, but being appaled at the very idea of circumventing miosis is just weird to me. But perhaps I'm just odd.

Problems

The problem with this is that scientists want to get credit for what they are doing. Both of my parents are scientists and even though they want to get more people interested in science they want to get the credit, not someone else who manages to see that two and two equals four where they didn't.

Re:Problems

How unproductive. No wonder cancer hasn't been cured yet, if this is the sort of "me, me, me" squabbling that goes on in science.

Understandable though, assuming that this credit leads to further funding for the said scientists.

Yes, you are right ... collaborating instead of competing for sure could lead to more interesting research, faster breakthroughs and a good community spirit among scientists. But in biology (that's the only discipline I can really talk about), this is pretty much a thing of the past, since grants, funding, positions in academia as well as in industry are to a large extent a direct function of how many papers you have published, and in what journals you published them. Only the best and brightest (something like 20-30 articles at age 35, and a handful of them in excellent journals) will get a shot at a group leader position.

This system has its merits, but one corollary is that you're not actually selecting the best and brightest, but perhaps the best-connected and those who can "sell" their work better than others. Another corollary, which is more damaging in the long run perhaps, is that nobody shares his data unless his authorship is acknowledged and under lock and seal. Conferences have become boring. I hear that 10-15 years ago, people would come to conferences and share the freshest, most exciting data from their lab. Nowadays, nobody gives a talk or shows a poster at a conference where the data isn't already published (i.e. you most likely read it already), or at least accepted for publication (i.e. you maybe read the e-pub ahead of print).

It's sad, and it's - exactly as you stipulate - due to all the rewards being tied to your publication record. Publish or perish, as they say.

Interesting circle

All the time in articles, books, etc. relating to open source and free software people mention Newton's assertion that science is based on other people's work and that it stands "on the shoulders of giants". It's interesting now that [b]science[/b], in this article, is making an analogy to free/open source software for the same reasons. Kind of the completion of a circle, eh?

Also, although I know very very little about "biotech", I like it just because it's one letter away from "BIOTCH".

Great, now we're going to have 5C13nCe n00b5

The big question is who is going to write the manuals. It's not as if biotech isn't already difficult enough.

Aren't we past this?

Openness? I can't see how the biotech, medical, and defense companies could make a profit by giving the tools to research and create to just anyone.

Plus, wouldn't this put the tools of terrorism in the hands of those who would destroy us for the sake of tens of virgins in the afterlife?

The safe thing to do is to hide all knowledge of these technologies from everyone who isn't a corporation based in the U.S.. That way, these tools can only be used for the good of the human race.

Bleh.

Unintended Consequences: Less New Medicine

Open access to biotechnology may have unintended consequences that reduce the utility of the biotech knowledge. As much as people hate patents, they do serve a purpose. Giving someone a monopoly right to sell something gives them the incentive to spend money on development. Drug development is hideously expensive -- without some hope of a billion dollar blockbuster payoff, companies aren't going to invest anything in open-access pharmaceuticals.

Now if we could convince goverments to spend money on all aspects of pharma development, we might be OK. Unfortunately, I'd bet that the funding government would get cranky when other countries freely exploit the medicines that the one government paid for. Citizens of countries that fund pharma R&D might reasonably object to shouldering all the burden of developing new medicines for the whole world. Does anyone think the UN would be an effective body for funding the rapid development of new drugs?

Finally, patents are a form of open access (at least in the U.S.). Patents force companies to publish their inventions. This gives competitors a leg up in innovating around any new patented process. Its not as open as the proposed Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) program, but the current system is not as closed as detractors would have you believe.

Re:Unintended Consequences: Less New Medicine

I think I do see your point, but I guess a distinction can be made between tools, i.e. methods, reagents, protocols (and to some extent labware) that are necessary for basic science and the drug development process. In the end, cheap access to basic biotech techniques may be beneficial for big pharma, as well, cutting down research costs.

There are some things on the market in biotech where the distributor (typically the company didn't invent it, they bought the rights from a university) are more or less monopolizing a technique, with the help of patents and license agreements. And the price that you pay at university for this stuff is - while it's expensive - nothing to the price big pharma has to spend for the same thing. I am not talking about hi-tech equipment, but for instance a method + all the reagents to create stably transfected cell lines (that is, a cell that expresses a newly inserted gene). Sure, the work of the person who built up the system needs to be acknowledged, but the price for this kit is just a phantasy price.

In the end, I think, big pharma wouldn't suffer all that much, and neither would drug development

Done Deal

pubmed [nih.gov]

golden path [ucsc.edu]

bioconducter [bioconductor.org]

public library of science [plos.org]

gnumeric [gnome.org]

cluster analysis [lbl.gov]

etc. etc. etc.

What's the BFD ??? A lot of scientists are on the open source bandwagon and have been for years. Walmart's coming to town and the Ivory Towers are falling.

Common Sense

Well, the impact of this all depends on what is meant by "tools". A lot of the tools of the trade for genetic research (lysing and ligand enzymes, PCR machines, etc.) can easily be purchased from many scientific suppliers, and the methods for creating such tools are well enough known that they can easily be replicated (at my old high school, I kid you not, the Biology teacher and some students constructed a fully functional home-made PCR setup using off-the-shelf hobbyist robotics compnents).

Now, what I'm thinking is that this fellow is proposing "open research". This is a direct reaction to the flurry of biotech patents we've seen over the last few years. Instead of jeleaously gaurding any new biotechnological inventions or discoveries, they would be shared with the community and opened up for peer review. My, that sounds familiar... maybe because it's what the process of scientific inquiry has depended on for centuries. In fact, you might recall that when RMS founded the FSF, his goal was to rekindle the spirit of "software as science" that had existed in the early days of computing. In the days of "biotech as business", scientific openness is an old idea whose time has once again come.

Much is already freely available

I don't know what this guy is talking about. You can already do substantial genetic research with freely available tools and data from the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. A major area of granting by both NIH and NSF is the creation of open source or freely available software for genetic research. I would say that bioinformatics is one of the most active areas for free software development today. I would say that the largest problem in biotech is not that tools are closed access, but that companies can patent biological and genetic information that they discover with their open access, publically developed tools.

prophetic reporting from Wired?

Wired [wired.com] has an interesting article related to this story. Summary: Open-Source as a design philosophy will be applied to an increasingly diverse set of disciplines.

Not a very good idea,

Considering that the world is currently in a stage where third-world rogue nations, and not a duality of superpowers keeping each other in check, are developing high technology, especially weapons of mass destruction.

While the implementation of open source programs and operating systems are great, genetic science is playing God by modifying organisms in irreperable ways, whether they're perceived to be good, bad, or sort of silly like those glowing fish. Even worse, such tools under skilled hands -- usually free university education in the west -- could be used to make gene-specific bioweapons or unstoppable virii like our army just did.

Imagine their scientists getting a huge head start with "accessible" genetics tools under the iron fist of a dictator who would want to use them for blackmail, and then goes insane for one reason or another and acutally uses them. Even if they reached the level the US and the USSR were at in the 1970s or more realistically, the 1980s, with their research, it could still spell disaster.

Most of this playing-God genetic stuff shouldn't even be developed in the first place, much less be made more accessible to the despots of the third world like an open source program.

amazing

This development was long overdue. Still, it seems to have a destiny as impotent and sterile as the talk about a "new world economic order" that seems to dominate the agenda at the UN. What surprised me is that it comes from Rockefeller Foundation sponsorship. How times have changed!

New Industries-New Rules

Historically, major new industries have put new practices in place. Industrialization for example was a major part of the impulse behind universal, cumpulsory education in Germany.

What I read here:

Major portions of the biotech community feel their field would be enhanced by moving towards something more like the Open Source community. The implication of this is that the intellectual property rules may need to change a bit for this to really happen. What might motivate the powers that be to want to make this happen: most wealth/political power in the world is controlled by older folks. Biotech is especially important to the old because biotech has the serious possibility of extending human life spans-and more importantly extending the quality of human life. Basically the political elites have a choice:

Continue playing their games-and die at age 70-85.

Listen to the biotech folks and live comfortably an extra 15-30 years.

I think that the powers-that-be will choose the second choice. We'll see a greater mix in means of rewarding inventors as the biotech revolution develops.

Past tense

"...just as computer programming tools were shared in the open source software movement."

Were? As in... the OSS movement that is complete?

Not sure how I feel about this idea - to speed up progress research should be shared, but individual benefits should also drive that research. Why would you go into biophysics if your work wasn't going to pay off? (I know there are other reasons, but money's still at the top of most people's list).

someone stop this idiot

I don't know how we're going to restrict the spread of advanced biotech knowledge, but I wish I did. Yeah, information wants to be free -- I agree, until that information can kill people. In fifteen years an undergrab microbio degree will be enough to create a plague. The methods won't require particularly exotic reagents and the equipment won't be hard to get.

This is not equivalent to the debate over publishing exploit source. There is no guarantee that biological countermeasures can be created to counteract bio-malware, so increasing the pool of exploit-related knowledge is not to our benefit. Besides which, people will die while we wait for the equivalent of patches to be submitted.

Is it possible to amend the GPL to prohibit its use for distributing potentially dangerous biological information -- something like the ebola genome? Perhaps a review board could be established for biological information that is to be distributed under the GPL. I realize this does nothing to stop the information's spread under a different scheme, but at least it might discourage the foolish from cross-applying OSS principles to arenas where they most decidedly do NOT belong.

I really don't agree with you

Since when has 'restricting the spread of advanced XYZ knowledge' ever worked? Sure, the RIAA/MPAA would love to contain the spreading of the dangerous knowledge that you can use file sharing programs, and microsoft would love to keep all the advances knowledge about how to build an OS secret. After all, knowing how an OS works could arguably lead to damages and lives lost, like hacking into a power grid (yes, I am becoming a bit melodramatic, I'll stop now, I promise).

My point is: It's a bad idea to restrict the spread of knowledge, since we simply can't. Good textbooks about biology will teach you a fair bit about molecular biology, and lab techniques. All this can be used for good or for bad purposes, as with (almost) all technology. So how do you wish to contain this knowledge? Prohibit anyone from teaching biology? Or perhaps teach biology only in the US, thus protecting the homeland? (oops I am bitter again...)

In that vein, do you think that amending the GPL would help in containing information? Bad people who are planning to kill usually don't worry too much about breaking the terms of a license. And as for the Ebola genome, it's here [nih.gov], courtesy of the NIH. And it is there, publicly available, since some people are actually wanting to study it to find a remedy, and fortunately, they are not all employed by the USAMRIID or DoD but are all over the world.

The spread of the free software mode of production

Good stuff, the more areas of human activity that the free software way of producing things spreads to the better, another science thing is featured on the front page of Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] at the moment, PLoS:

The Public Library of Science [publiclibr...cience.com] is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate [nobel.se] and former head of the National Institutes of Health [nih.gov] Harold Varmus [plos.org], molecular biologist Pat Brown [plos.org] of Stanford University [stanford.edu], and biologist Michael Eisen [plos.org] of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab [lbl.gov] and UC Berkeley [berkeley.edu]. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times [latimes.com] put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Science and education seem to be areas where this is taking off at the moment, the design of things seems to be happening at a lot slower rate. Perhaps the lack of free CAD software to compete with AutoCAD is one of the main things holding this back?

I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy a washing machine and vacuum cleaner that are build from designs under GPL style licences...

Genetically Engineered mice for all!

So, when can I pick up my own personal mouse with a functioning hand growing off it's back?

We can still hope :-D ....

"With Linux and all the open source innovations, you're not seeing the death of Microsoft, you're seeing Microsoft work harder to be a better company so that it can stay afloat."

Perhaps the birth of a new paradigm

For the last few hundred years, commerce has been the driving goal behind human development, barring the occasional major war... The reasons are based in the costs of production, dissemination, and utilisation of knowledge and materials, versus the potential profit of using that information.

One new factor is communication, which has advanced to the level where no great expense is required for long-distance communications. Merchant princes rose and fell by their application of knowledge that others didn't have, today we have near-as-dammit instant communication with negligible costs. We pay people in other countries, and have a truly global market.

There is another new factor coming into play: zero- (or at least, minimal) cost goods.Until recently, manufacturing costs were per-copy of an object, now we deal in abstract knowledge more often, recreating the object we desire locally. This obviously doesn't apply to real physical objects, but how often do we download models, music, video, programs, and data. There is negligible duplication costs involved here, so costs can be amortised over the whole collection, and are far less per item.

Perhaps we can see forward to a future where digital assets have limited protection; the competitive advantage of being first compensating for the lower barrier-to-entry for companies. The first steps towards a truly creative commons, open to all without restriction. If such a thing were ever to become reality, the GPL or a similar (not-for-profit-without-forking-out-dosh) licence would be ideal. In that case, I think we'd all be significantly more grateful to RMS than we are today...

Or perhaps not. (And I leave the reader to decide which point I refer to with 'not' :-)

Simon

Security and Updates

This... bothers me. I'm not sure that I like taking a stance against openness in science, but the comparison to the open source movement made me realize something about why this isn't a good idea. The open source movement is founded on the idea that thousands of eyes on source code allow it to be improved and constantly updated. Bugs are fixed, servers are patched, and viruses are defeated.

This doesn't work for biology.

When a malicious researcher discovers (for lack of a better word) an exploit [slashdot.org] for the human body, we can't just patch and reboot our systems to compensate. I think that until we can better develop rapid-response countermeasures to new engineered diseases, we might want to hold off on such a proposition. There are too many dangerous things that we can do with today's knowledge that we can't counter to be widely opening it all up.

Anyone else...

Anyone else read that as "The opening of Bieotch?"

According to this article [slashdot.org], I'm probably not alone.

RPL not GPL

The idea of bureaucratic clones in a corporate hive benefiting, without reciprocation, from the biotech innovations of grassroots technologists is even more repugnant than such parasitic phenomena in traditional information technology.

Clause 2.b of the GPL [gnu.org] has been interpreted by everyone from Richard Stallman to Bruce Perens to mean that the larger the organization the less likely they are to publish derivative works because internal distribution is not covered under the GPL. Like many tax policies that penalize small businesses and favor conglomerates, the GPL is designed to encourage bureaucratic growth.

The RPL [opensource.org] is more viral. The RPL requires that those who want to keep their derivative works private, find some other licensing arrangement with the authors. If some bureacrat wants to make viruses from free public technology, then he at least gets a viral public license.

objectives of biotech

The point that Jefferson is trying to get across is not that patents should be outlawed (his group's idea is that end products can be sold, but that tools should be shared) or that big biotech companies should not succeed, but rather that the ultimate goal of those companies is to make money for themselves. Large profits do not lie in creating useful technologies for developing countries, they lie in creating wonder drugs for the rich fraction of the world.

This is no different from the technologies applied to American crops, it's just that the idea is to make it easier for poor countries and their citizens to help solve their own problems. Seems to me that this wouldn't affect big business all that much, and it could give a real boost to the places and people that really need it.

And really, the evil terrorists who want to develop the WMD - are they going to sit around saying "well, if only we weren't limited by those dratted patent laws?" No. This idea is pretty much designed to help those who need it - the evildoers don't really need any help.

awesome

This would be cool. With open-source biotech, it would likely be a matter of months before we'd have single-celled creatures capable of administering Quake servers!

GPL tools

A few years ago I wrote a little molecular biology helper program to use in my graduate studies. Slapped the GPL on it and made it available for download on my site. This was before the age of sourceforge.net and all the other modern facilities. It stayed up for about 2 years, and was downloaded about 20 times in all. Then I changed ISPs several and the original page didn't make it to the new one.

I may still have the source code somewhere - maybe I'll put it up again if I can find it, or maybe set a sourceforge project or something.

Why I like it...

If it means I'll get my flying monkey-man or dogs that spit bees, I'm all over it!

-Goran

Bio Perl & CPAN

BioPerl.org, biojava.org and CPAN have loads of useful tools, functions and modules for the biological programmer (bioinformatition) out there, this is all free and mostly great.

Human viruses considered harmful

The guy wants

"free access to the scientific tools of modern biology and genetics...just as computer programming tools were shared in the open source software movement...

Last time I checked, a computer that gets a new and nasty kind of virus can still be cleaned up and restarted. A human that gets a new and nasty kind of virus may not be so lucky.

It's a big assumption to suppose there is any useful analogy between open source for computer code and for biological materials! It would be a potential human hazard to give 'free access' to all biological research materials.

But if 'free access' is just taken to mean that accredited researchers doing work under fully controlled conditions should not have to pay for research materials that they may want to play with -- then the options are already there, and sometimes used, for researchers (or their institutions) to exchange materials without payment and authorise their use -- at the option of the researcher/institution originating the material.

-wb-

Biotech != Medicine

Dr. Jefferson is interested in agricultural biotechnology. While most people who commented on this article have equated biotechnology to medical research, this is not the area in which open science is most needed. It is in the agricultural sector where funding is tight, profit margins slim and there was a long history of sharing materials and methods in the public (even private) sector that open science is desperately needed. In the 1980s, the ability to patent methods and living things in combination with the Bayh-Dole act started a chain of events which has diminished the ability of agricultural researchers to work for the public efficiently.

Some will argue that the ability of companies to patent materials and methods promotes research by promising a return. As a scientist working in the field of plant breeding I see that this is not the case here. Large biotech / seed companies are most interested in working on species which are grown widely (e.g. corn, soybeans and cotton) and on which they can make a profit due to economies of scale. Many minor crops which are important to those people who grow and consume them (particularly in the developing world) do not get the attention of the large companies. Plant breeding efforts must be regional because plants interact with their environment in ways that cannot be easily predicted. Therefore a variety bred for use in the midwest of the United States might not be suitable for use in the northeast let alone Africa or Asia. If the modern molecular biology tools which are useful are encumbered by patents which restrict their use (either directly or through licensing costs) the ability of people all over the world to benefit from scientific knowledge and use that knowledge to feed themselves is lost.

This problem is compounded by the fact that in the development of new varieties many genes / methods are included. Multiple parties might be patent holders in one variety which could easily price the variety out of the market. An example (which was resolved with complex negotiations) is the so called golden rice (contains increased vitamin A precursors) which involves about 30 different patents.

As others have pointed out, a system of open tools / technologies in the sciences is great for the many of the same reasons free software development works so well. There are some of us who are working to promote both of these things in the agricultural sciences. If we succeed, plant breeders in developing countries will be able to tackle the difficult problems which face their farmers and their people and they will be able to do it without having to rely on the generosity of the developed nations and / or multinational corporations.

BIOTECH IS GODZILLA

Bio-technology
Ain't what's so bad
Like all technology
It's in the wrong hands

Cut-throat corporations
Don't give a damn
When lots of people die
From what they've made

-Jello Biafra [lyricsdir.com]

Superfluous

This initiative sounds nice, but most if not all molecular biology techniques and tools are already accessible to anyone who can read. The basic techniques are described in a set of manuals that anyone can buy (the famous "Maniatis"), several computation tools (BLAST, Consed, Phred/Phrap, Clustal(X) and so on) are already freely available. Molecular biology kits are not free nor open source, but you don't really need those if you have the manual. Making the results of your research freely available (using for instance www.plos.org), THAT would be truly innovative and useful.

This isn't new.

A group in the US was trying to loby for the same thing about 2 years ago. They published a few journal articles about it. You can find them through www.proquest.com.

This argument sparked alot of debate about whether using open source tools and software meant that the findings of that research was also open source (Obviously bolocks but that's what the appoenents were trying to say)

Re:Why this is a bad idea.

Currently cheap drugs from Canada flood the US. These drugs are exactly identical to more expensive US drugs but the cheap prices hurt the drug companies, which in turn hurts America. This cannot continue. US drug companies contribute millions of dollars to politicians every year, without these contributions people may hear ugly truths about them. This must stop.

Apparently you havent been watching American news. THE DRUGS ARENT SAFE!
Americanos: "These drugs are under no restrictions and are not safe!"
Canadians: "Yes, they are safe, and we have pretty much the same restrictions as you do, and the drugs are identical to the ones you sell, they are just sold be different providers, and due to our market differences, ours are cheaper"
Americanos: "But they are cheaper! And our companies are losing business! This means they are bad."
Canadians: "Well, if you dont like them, stop them at the border" (I was happy when I heard that)
Americanos: "We cannot! We will put more news articles out there about how unsafe your drugs are!"

Obviously, these drugs are unsafe, and illegal.

a moderators take....

If this post were only _slightly_ more thought out and not so reactionary id would probably mod up. I know they are trolling but some good points are made. The disease industry we have in America is not the right system for the rest of the world (just like sometimes democracy isnt). Eventually for humans to continue and survive over the next 100 years information will become free - the internet is certainly a catalyst and is enabling the sharing of informaton that could have meant death for treason a scant twenty years ago. I like to see a little hope in the news every now and again but it seems the above troll still sees the bottle as half empty....

Re:It's a neat idea.

In every nation in the world where there is still widespread hunger, the problem is not the lack of food, but the presense of tyranny.

Starvation is now almost exclusively a political problem.

Re:I can see it now, Laden clones and super germs

Doing this will make it easier to clone people and create WoMD. Not the best idea

I don't think there would be a problem. The cloning and the WMD might level out.

Re:I can see clearly now...

What's up with these goons improperly modding my posts lately?

This is in no way, shape, or form a troll. Not even a little bit.

Re:As a Maths Geek I find this funny ....

Yes, except when people try to patent bits of it liks the DHT and RSA encryption.

PS. SCO is also known as RoBiN, HAL's evil twin.

Re:Cost of reproduction

This is a good point, and I'd add the most intriguing aspect of the current patent crisis - that the METHOD, the PROCESS is often patented. This is very difficult to overcome, but it must be if we wish to see social justice and innovation - and good business - mentioned in the same sentence. The coordinated commissioning of new technology is one way forward. While hardware is indeed important, I think the most challenging part is the patented methods and procedures. Trivial for academics to repeat; impossible for small business. Also, the thicket of patents and overlapping claims is a deeply frustrating and challenging issue. A single key process may be protected by literally hundreds of patent claims by many different owners. How can low-margin activities like agriculture and food security ever negotiate these? This is one thing driving us - drop the transaction costs, make real creativity into small markets possible.