Hey Marc,
I thought about making this step since I first had the idea
at the iGEM jamboree 2009 in the MIT... btw: some credit also goes to a
mexican biology (probably ex-student by now). After the party we were joking about synthetic biology and what we could do with it...
but later i reconsidered the idea and it turned out to be much more than a joke and really doable. Thats how this idea was born. I forgot the name of the mexican though.
He was someone of those people:
http://2009.igem.org/Team:LCG-UNAM-Mexico/Team or
http://2009.igem.org/Team:IPN-UNAM-Mexico/Team I kept it for myself all the time waiting for a chance to develop it. Then I looked into patenting procedures
and startup stuff until I now made this decision to make it public. Basically the Gates foundation contract
claims
all IP property when only submitting an idea. So I thought its best to
have the IP it in the public domain before submitting :P
As far as I understand the legal situation, I now cannot patent it in europe anymore, but still in the US.
Maybe I would do it in the US to convince investors, but I am not very eager to do so.
If
the concepts works as i imagine it, it would be a quite powerfull
device, and there is a chance of abuse of that power. I really think we
dont need a Monsanto type of company for human reproduction...
so i figured that it is probably most safe and more likely to have a beneficial outcome in the public domain.
Ideally,
I can convince companies worldwide as well as public researchers to
join forces and develop the thing together. For companies it would be
beneficial since they would only need to pay a little share of the
development costs but could start producing and selling relatively
quickly. The WHO is, as far as i know, also interested in getting such
developments done, so maybe they could pay the clinical trials, at least
partially.
If someone would like to join in the project: It needs a website for researchers to share data and ideas about it.
I would upload all my labresults to it and then hope for others to join in. Some kind of crowdsourcing mechanism...
Of course this is a bit a naive and optimistic approach, but it is the best I can do, since I am not the director
of
a big institute and dont see any clear path to get it going on my own
without selling all the rights and then taking the risk of monopolistic
abuse. And even for a bio startup it is a too big thing to tackle drug
development.
Such an endeavour takes at least 10 years and approx.
500million dollars... Most entrepreneurs i talked to just keep their
ideas secret, dont patent
and then try to find someone who will buy it after a few years of
development. So only really big companies can bring it all the way to
the market.... or really many small people alltogether ( the linux
style). lets see what happens, it is an open-source biotech experiment
:)
Another reason not to patent is: it is a pain in the ass and i
did not
study biology for 7 years to torture my brain with law and bureaucrazy.
All professors I talked to (including the golden rice inventor Peter
Beyer) said they did it once and never again... so that speaks for
itself, i'd say. I want to travel, meet cool people and develop sciency
stuff that benefits mankind altogether. Nothing against having a decent
ammount of money, but i just dont need to die super rich in the
end...there is no reason for that and I only have one
lifetime, so why wasting it by obsessing about money and all these
unpleasent activities that come along with it. Reproduction is
much cooler topic to wrap your mind around - and much more important, either :D
I just need someone to pay my further research...so if Bill doesnt want my idea, does anyone know
where to find funding for stuff like that? At best just ask all your profs and pharma people around you if they want to contribute or have a good suggestion how to proceed.