Word: patent
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Last week at Bio2000, a gathering of more than 10,000 scientists, biotech entrepreneurs and patent attorneys in Boston, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Research Institute, announced another major milestone. In the past four months his international consortium of public- and foundation-funded laboratories, with its robotic machinery knocking off 12,000 units every minute, has decoded another billion letters. That puts the group two-thirds of the way toward its goal of wrapping up the entire genome of 3 billion letters. "We're on the back nine," crowed Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead/M.I.T. Center...
More than vanity is at stake. If Venter's Celera wins what has become an increasingly bitter competition, government scientists fear, the human genome will be entangled in patent and licensing battles as rival drug firms seek protection for agents they are hoping to develop from the newly emerging genetic blueprint. With the announcement last week by Collins' team, though, these concerns are subsiding because Collins has been making the data public as he goes by putting it on the Internet every day. Says Lander: "Now there is no doubt that a genome will be freely available...
...that all these scientific theories won't ultimately be replaced by ones with greater explanatory power? Galileo and Newton thought their laws of motion were the cat's pajamas, explaining everything under the sun and many things beyond, but 2 1/2 centuries later a Swiss patent clerk toppled their notions of space and time. Obviously, Galileo and Newton did not foresee what Einstein found. I think it's ahistorical to assert that in the future there will never be an Einstein of, say, the mind who will be able to pull together a theory of consciousness. And even...
...future--yes, but only in short hops, I suspect. To the past--very likely not. Such travel is expensive, dangerous and subject to quantum effects that may or may not spoil your chances of coming back alive. Those of us working in this field aren't rushing to the patent office with time-machine blueprints. But we are interested in knowing whether time machines are possible, even in principle, because answering that question will tell us where the boundaries of physics lie and provide clues to how the universe works...
...talked about everything from the writings of the Renaissance to patent law to the elections," he adds. "I've met and spent time with everyone outside the formal time. I think that's rare...