On open-source pharma

(This copies a comment I left on Derek Lowe’s blog at Science Magazine.)

I was the foundational theorist of open-source software development back in the 1990s, and have received a request to respond to your post on open-source pharma.

Is there misplaced idealism and a certain amount of wishful thinking in the open-source pharma movement? Probably. Something I often find myself pointing out to my more eager followers is that atoms are not bits; atoms are heavy, which means there are significant limiting factors of production other than human attention, and a corresponding problem of capital costs that is difficult to make go away. And I do find people who get all enthusiastic and ignore economics rather embarrassing.

On the other hand, even when that idealism is irrational it is often a useful corrective against equally irrational territoriality. I have observed that corporations have a strong, systemic hunker-down tendency to overprotect their IP, overestimating the amount of secrecy rent they can collect and underestimating the cost savings and additional options generated by going open.

I doubt pharma companies are any exception to this; when you say “the people who are actually spending their own cash to do it have somehow failed to realize any of these savings, because Proprietary” as if it’s credulous nonsense, my answer is “Yes. Yes, in fact, this actually happens everywhere”.

Thus, when I have influence I try to moderate the zeal but not suppress it, hoping that the naive idealists and the reflexive hunker-downers will more or less neutralize each other. It would be better if everybody just did sound praxeology, but human beings are not in general very good at that. Semi-tribalized meme wars fueled by emotional idealism seem to be how we roll as a species. People who want to change the world have to learn to work with human beings as they are, not as we’d like them to be.

If you’re not inclined to sign up with either side, I suggest pragmatically keeping your eye on the things the open-source culture does well and asking if those technologies and habits of thought can be useful in drug discovery. Myself, I think the long-term impact of open data interchange formats and public, cooperatively-maintained registries of pre-competitive data could be huge and is certainly worth serious investment and exploration even in the most selfish ROI terms of every party involved.

The idealists may sound a little woolly at times, but at least they understand this possibility and have the cultural capital to realize it – that part really is software.

Then…we see what we can learn. Once that part of the process has been de-territorialized, options to do analogous things at other places in the pipeline may become more obvious,

P.S: I’ve been a huge fan of your “Things I Won’t Work With” posts. More, please?