Thursday 20 November 2008

Sharing - it's a good thing

“If you sequence a virus and you leave it in the drawers for three years, you might as well not sequence it,” says Ilaria Capua, the Italian virologist and director of the OIE/FAO Reference Laboratory for Avian Influenza at the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie in Italy.

Seed Magazine, that very stylish ‘Science is Culture’ publication, recently named Capua as of one of its Revolutionary Minds for 2008.

Capua is the first veterinarian to be included in this list of opinion leaders in the scientific world.

Seedmagazine.com Revolutionary Minds
"Revolutionary Minds: Ilaria Capua"
View the video (4:39 mins)
Visit the website
Capua's small act of rebellion was just the spark for a much larger challenge to the system

She is outstanding because of her efforts in sharing avian influenza data within the scientific community through GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data).

This is remarkable because some sectors of the scientific community, especially the private ones, are not known for wanting to move beyond patents, copyrights and subscriptions.

Capua tells Seed: “I think if you have a big impending threat of concern to human and animal health, then there is no time to keep the information to yourself.

“The system that was up and running at the time wasn’t suitable for the health threat. Hundreds of sequences were generated and were not made available to a larger community of scientists. So I just said: ‘My virus is going into Genbank. Full stop.’

“I actually sent an email to quite a lot of my colleagues saying: ‘I invite you to think about this because there isn’t any space, at least in my opinion, for keeping information in drawers.’”

Patenting the genetic sequence of living organisms has always been tricky. On one hand, the private outfits that spend so much money on such projects want to see some return on investment for all their hard work. Well, you’ve got to pay your bills somehow.

Capua admitted: “The problem with Genbank is that it doesn’t give the depositor any sort of ownership in the protection of intellectual property.”

But on the other hand, some argue that this act is no more different to the way the imperial naval ships behaved during the era of gunboat diplomacy barely three centuries ago.

It’s like Captain James Cook, who, upon discovering New Zealand (after the Maoris, of course), saying to the Spaniards, the Dutch, the French et al: “Alright, guys. My route to New Zealand from Europe is my copyright. If you want to come here, you’ll have to find your own route.”

When I put forward this analogy to a few scientists, one said it doesn’t matter – eventually you’ll find the report or paper on the DNA sequence on some free data-sharing online portal anyway. Another scientist said that some of these efforts have been upheld by the EU law.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. So in response to the comments made by the two scientists, I only have this animation below to illustrate my point:


"Share by Habib Yazdi"
View the video (0:53 mins)
This Flash animation by Habib Yazdi, a senior communication studies major at University of Carolina, was named the winner of the SPARKY Awards in January 2008