Along Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, scientific
explorers are trying to turn
over a new leaf for a storied institute
— the National Biodiversity Institute,
or INBio....Created in 1989, INBio, based in a suburb of
the capital San Jose, became an early symbol
for how developing nations might participate
sustainably in the biotechnology revolution.
World-class researchers joined with Costa
Rica’s well-trained academics, hoping to save
the nation’s biodiversity — 4% of the world’s
total — by making money from it....Today, other developing nations look to
INBio as an example of how to achieve the
goals of the 1992 Convention on Biological
Diversity, which encourages sustainable development
worldwide....
Advocates hope [that sustenance for INBio] will
come from the Fogarty International Center at
the US National Institutes of Health, which is
giving the new bioprospecting team $3.5 million
over four years....Led by chemist Jon Clardy of Harvard Medical
School, the five-year project includes
researchers from the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor, the Broad Institute — a joint venture
of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology — and the Novartis
Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge,
Massachusetts....The current project is designed...to
be as open as possible about any potential new
drug candidates. With the earlier grants, any
compounds of interest left Costa Rica, disappearing
behind the proprietary walls of corporate
science. Clardy, who was part of the earlier
ICBG when at Cornell, says he didn’t want the
new programme making the same mistakes....[T]he data will be publicly accessible,
in a database containing information such
as where the compounds were collected and
under what conditions. Clardy foresees an
eventual library with some 5,000 to 10,000
compounds collected during the project. The
database could even contain details on how
compounds respond in various screening tests
against pathogens, information that is usually
considered proprietary. Clardy’s group would get first shot at studying
any promising disease-fighting compounds.
But eventually the data would enter
the publicly accessible ChemBank.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/23/2006 11:15:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
