The NYT this morning runs a headline about dramatic progress against Alzheimer’s due to a sharing of findings. The story is breathless about how scientists and institutions have, astonishingly, put aside their copyrights and patents in order to make progress. And the hope is that this will be a model for the future.
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.
Now, anyone who has read a history of invention and technology and medical progress can immediately see that there is something very odd about this. Sharing findings, broadcasting results, publishing data, attracting attention and inviting colleagues in on research, has been the path forward for, well, the whole of human history. It was built into the sociology of the scientific community. That’s because everyone has an interest in learning from everyone else. The practice of using the state to maintain a proprietary interest in scientific results, particularly medical results, is a recent trend, and we can only hope that it is coming to an end. Meanwhile, we are left to wonder, in a Bastiatian sense, about the unseen costs of the imposition of intellectual “property rights” on scientific research – information that once revealed is non-scarce by its nature.
One cannot quote Jefferson enough on this point: “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
