Richard Hosking wrote: > It is an interesting idea that medical knowledge should be "open source". > Certainly clinical medicine is "open", though some areas of medicine are > increasingly proprietary, such as pharmaceuticals and the processes > underlying pathology.
Yes, very unfortunate trends. At the very least, the intellectual property protection regimes for health-related technologies need to be reformed, so that drug companies can, for example, only get patents on important new drugs for 5 years instead of 14 years as they can now. > The human genome has been patented. No it hasn't been. It is freely available - you can download and explore the whole lot of you like. Certain genes contained within the human genome have been patented, but not the whole thing. And even then, those patents are often limited in scope to specific applications of those genes and those are often US-only patents (patents are not world-wide, they need to be applied for and secured in each country for them to have an effect in that country). > I suppose in > the old days if you were a witch doctor, it didnt make commercial sense > to open your knowledge to everyone.. Indeed. Tim C Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th. > Tim Churches wrote: > >> Horst Herb wrote: >> >> >>> Yes I do. This is why I charge >= $200/hour, yet the farmhand I >>> employ to fix my fences only gets $20/hour, or the lady doing the >>> ironing only $18/hour >>> >> >> I'm a bit shocked that Horst doesn't do his own ironing... >> >> >> > > Ironing is a bit of a mystery to me > _______________________________________________ > Gpcg_talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk > _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
