Wikinomics by Don Tapscott

Author:Don Tapscott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.

The Open Source Opportunity

Having witnessed what Linux has done for software production it seems natural to wonder whether a flurry of open source activity could unleash a similar revolution in the life sciences. What if the drug discovery process, for example, was opened up so that anyone could participate, modify the output, or improve it, provided they agree to share their modifications under the same terms? Could the collective intelligence of the life sciences community be harnessed to enable a more coordinated and comprehensive attack on the intractable diseases that have so far stymied the industry? Could opening up the process to tens of thousands of volunteer researchers lower the cost of drug development to the point where the resulting medicines are within reach of the world’s poor? A small number of visionaries think there is an enormous opportunity here. But no one is suggesting it will be easy.

For one, there are fundamental differences between creating software and developing new drugs. Software production is easy to break up into bit-size pieces that can be carried out on a laptop while sitting in Starbucks. Drug development is harder to parse out and requires access to expensive laboratory instruments. Software projects can be completed in months, or even days and weeks. A typical drug currently takes ten to fifteen years and an average of $800 million to develop. Making software inventions commercially viable is easy and inexpensive—just post it on the Internet. Biological inventions take years of painstaking clinical trials and a healthy dose of regulatory know-how to reach that point. All these factors make drug development less hospitable to peer production than software.

On the other hand, there is much that unites open source programmers and the biomedical research community. Both communities share similar goals (free software and accessible medicines) and are driven by similar motivations (such as reputation and learning). They share strong community ethics, such as reciprocal sharing and collaborative discovery. And most of the people who contribute to collaborative projects in software and biomedicine are either paid to do so directly (i.e., as employees of companies and universities), or do so in their spare time while earning a living in some facet of the industry.

The fact that drug discovery is increasingly conducted in computer networks rather than in test tubes opens another window to open source activity. Indeed, many of the tools for sifting through the mountains of genomic data produced by the Human Genome Project are already available as open source. Bioinformatics.org, one of several hubs for collaboration in the biomedical community, hosts over 250 active projects that extend open source software development practices to the biological research databases and software tools. Freely available genomic search-and-comparison algorithms such as BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) are becoming de facto standards in the community.

These factors suggest that peer production will have a significant role to play in drug discovery, particularly in the early stages, where the minds of thousands of scientists can be harnessed to identify promising candidates. But

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