This is kind of sickening. See:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/health/research/13alzheimer.html?_r=1&hp>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/health/research/13alzheimer.html
QUOTES:
Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer's
By GINA KOLATA
In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National
Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and
medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined
in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative
effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of
Alzheimer's disease in the human brain.
Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific
papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's . . .
And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar
efforts against Parkinson's disease. . . .
The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as
its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast
scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding
public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.
No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications,
though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or
imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.
"It was unbelievable," said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer's
researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's not science the
way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized
that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos
and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all
of our data would be public immediately." . . .
. . .
What is so unbelievable about it? Why is this "rare"? Scientists are
supposed to share data, for crying out loud! Any textbook claims they do.
Most cold fusion researchers have not yet discovered the benefits of
sharing information.
- Jed
