Very interesting article that I found this morning reading Rebellion. It is the translation of an article originally published in English in LWN.net.
Basically, it talks about the enormous similarities that exist between the biotechnology and software development, which would consequently allow the use of the "free software" philosophy also in the development of any technological application that uses biological systems and living organisms or their derivatives for the creation or modification of products or processes. for specific uses.
The free software community, along with the business ecosystem that surrounds it, is widely considered to have pointed the way to successful cooperative commons development. We have witnessed a series of attempts to transfer the free software model to initiatives in other areas. The free content regimes, whose spearhead are sites like the Wikipedia, have adopted that model with considerable success. Other areas, such as hardware, are still waiting to find their way. The editor of this medium has recently read an interesting book ( Biology is Technology, by Rob Carlson) that raises a curious question: is there room for an ecosystem based around free "software", but housed in biological processors?
The central thesis of the book is that biological piracy advances at an accelerated pace to become yet another discipline of engineering. "Physical devices" are being crafted out of ordinary items, development tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the level of knowledge required to do something interesting plummets. The annual contest International Genetically Engineered MachineThe aim of which is, among other things, to increase the number of available 'biological elements', is receiving highly rated submissions that have been produced by secondary school students. The amount of bio-substrate piracy is increasing rapidly… and will continue to do so.
The doses of creativity that we will appreciate in this area elicit confidence and manifest panic at the same time. Biopiracy has the potential to transform healthcare, address energy problems, mitigate climate change, and much more. But it could also sow environmental devastation and favor horrendous attacks, both by individuals and governments. Carlson vigorously advocates openness as the best policy to address this technology. It asserts that only through openness can we build the kind of economy we need to make the best use of this technology, while at the same time understanding what others are about to do and defending ourselves against mistakes and abuse. Trying to keep technology a secret never works. The publisher of this outlet could compare attempts to restrict biotechnology to official efforts made a generation ago to limit encryption technology.
However, openness does not just mean freedom from regulatory interference; Carlson spends a great deal of time exploring the possibility of creating a successful business ecosystem based on the open source model. From an abstract level, the idea is compelling: it is not difficult to understand that nucleotide programming is essentially the same task as bit programming. A nucleotide is capable of encoding two bits instead of one; and the underlying processor is smaller and wet and smells, but it is still a program. As tools for working with DNA are taking on a computer-like orientation - rapidly becoming smaller, cheaper and more powerful - there is much to be said for creating license-free libraries based on genetic programs developed in basements. and private garages.
There are some projects to do just that. The BioBricks Foundation is working to create a freely available set of biological components. Another initiative is BiologyOpen Source, appropriately abbreviated as BiOS. These endeavors look promising, but a thorny problem looms, with which LWN readers will already be familiar.
That problem, of course, is that of patents. Currently, in the United States and other countries, genetic sequences can be patented, so companies in the sector are accumulating as many of them as possible. Things are fast approaching the point where it is difficult to work in biotechnology from a commercial point of view without running into someone else's patents; patents that often cover fundamental natural phenomena. Carlson tells an interesting story: it seems that the automobile and aviation industries have already encountered this problem and, in both cases, it turned out that companies could not do anything because they were always litigating for patents. The government intervened in the United States in both areas and forced the creation of patent pools so that companies would stop suing each other and start doing interesting things with technology again.
Patent pools (like patents in general) favor large, established companies over small ones. But it's the small ones where most of the innovation in any field originates. Carlson worries that the United States is headed for a situation where the most modest companies cannot afford to exist and innovation is strangled. An open source approach to biotechnology could precisely offer a way out of this situation.
But despite its similarities to software, working in this field with open source is going to be tough. The software is protected by intellectual property laws around the world; This makes it easy to use a rights authorization system to establish a legal regime that people (and companies) feel they are interested in contributing to. Genetic sequences do not enjoy this type of protection, so patents are the only avenue for anyone who feels the need to obtain some degree of control over how a discovery is used. A copyleft-style patent authorization mechanism can be established, but it is less practical and, in any case, the high cost of obtaining a patent raises an obstacle to non-existent access in the territory of authorizations based on intellectual property rights . Lone biohackers working in garages are not going to be collaborating with a community based on the patent system.
As a consequence of the differences between legal environments, attempts to establish systems similar to open source in the biotechnology field must establish their agreements under conditions different from those used by the software community. BioBricks must be in the public domain; he draft of the BioBrick Public Agreement (a cooperation agreement, not an authorization management mechanism) requires collaborating partners to make "an irrevocable promise not to exercise any intellectual property rights as a collaborator against users of the contributed materials." In contrast, BiOS is more structured as a patent pool in which, to enter, you have to pay a fee. Carlson does not consider any of these approaches ideal, but he also acknowledges that he cannot come up with a better idea.
Ultimately, what may be needed is a new and specific legal regime for biological discoveries. As Carlson points out, neither patents nor intellectual property rights are expressly mentioned in the United States Constitution; they are legislative creations. Perhaps some day a more enlightened legislative chamber than the one that governs us today will find a way to encourage the development of open biotechnology that works at all levels. It will be interesting to see if the recent judgment of the Federal Court of First Instance (US District Court) rejecting genetic patents raises some valuable thought in that direction.
You don't have to be a speculative novelist to imagine a world in which the freedom to use, modify and distribute biological codes is (at least) as important as the other freedoms applicable to software hosted on silicon. In any case, it does not seem that we are building a world that contemplates these kinds of freedoms; we don't even get a good idea of what the world will be like. Apparently, in the biotech industry there is a shortage of personalities of their own to play the role of Richard Stallmans, Linus Torvald, and so many others who have helped make free software work.
Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/381091/, translation by Ricardo García Perez for Rebelión