Granularity: One spoke broken will stop the wheel from turning

Increasingly, biological technologies are not self-contained, but are rather interdependent technologies which require several key components to function. Powerful technologies by analogy can be considered as ‘wheels’ requiring a number of ‘spokes’ to function. For instance, the ability to transfer a gene to a crop plant may require dozens of individually protected, discrete technologies. Denial of access to any one of these can and does deny the use of the technology by potential users, and worse, prevents the iterative and cooperative shaping and improvement of the technology to meet diverse users’ needs.

Unfortunately, the placing of one or more key components into the public domain allows no leverage to bring other components into a collective whole with broad access.

The public sector science community is complicit by neglect, as virtually all practices of academic scientists promote the belief that 'good science' can, almost by magic, transform itself into public or private goods. In fact, the conversion process is the stranglehold. The internet, and the ease and affordability of sharing data have made information, per se, no longer the critical point of control.

Thus, the laudable work by high-profile individuals and dedicated agencies to ensure genome sequences, genetic resources or indeed scientific results are placed in the public domain is insufficient, and worse, can be a diversion. This data, the genetic materials and the published science is routinely captured and hijacked - enclosed - by those entities, usually large multinational corporations that have access to the means of converting that information into economic value through goods or services. This enclosure rarely ensures a sustainable competitive advantage, and is sometimes an inadvertent and very unfortunate side effect of a strategy for industry survival.

These enabling technologies are the new, largely unseen battleground for public good and democratic involvement in problem solving, whether by public agencies or by private enterprise.

The clearly visible manifestation is the dramatic increase in the use of intellectual property protection by both public and private sector, the concomitant low standard but broad scope of such IP grants, and the trend towards exclusive licensing and exclusionary use of IP portfolios.

But the reality is that the technologies themselves are reflective of the marginalization of the needs of poor people, in their irrelevance, high expense and continued dependence on the suppliers of the technology.

Recently, the social and technological achievements of the community of programmers who created a public-spirited and public-good-binding world of open source software has also fomented a great change in the IT business world.

Interestingly, even the most ardent advocates of free market capital forces are finding that, with new business models, money can be made without controlling or restricting access to the tools of innovation. These tools may be considered pre-competitive for high-margin applications, but are crucially lacking for low-margin applications. Free access to such tools is critical for their continued evolution to be able to address the challenges of low margins and the market failures associated with the needs of poor people.

BIOS will play an important role in making other, parallel public-good oriented activities and IP focused initiatives more successful by providing templates for new licensing and sharing regimes, new tools for technology forecasting and management and by enhancing the pro-active analytical capabilities of Offices of Technology Transfer and the policy activities within those entities represented in its membership.

Initially, it is anticipated that streamlined commissioning and management of core technology improvements will best be done in a format such as BIOS that is technologically and legally sophisticated with a commitment to advanced informatics and communications. However, the intent is to develop fully ‘portable’ paradigms and procedures by which the concept can be promulgated in diverse institutional and cultural settings.

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