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gewg_ writes:

Glyn Moody reports

It's well-known that monopolies can lead to price-gouging, which produces effects like this:

I still have no idea how people can get away with charging several thousand dollars for a milligram of recombinant protein. That's an amount that you can see with the naked eye, if your eyesight is really good, but even then, you can see it only just barely. If you had to make a recombinant protein in your undergraduate biology class, then you know that the cost of doing this is essentially the cost of highly refined sugar water (= culture media) plus the cost of highly refined salt water (= chromatography buffers).

That comes from a fascinating essay by John Schloendorn, founder and CEO of Gene And Cell Technologies, a regenerative medicine startup, which appears in Issue 4 of the BioCoder journal. But here's the strange thing: the biological reagents market may show the classic symptoms of monopoly abuse, but as Schloendorn points out, there are very few actual monopolies here:

The protections of the closed-source biologics vending industry are actually thin as paper and brittle as glass. For most of this stuff, they have no patents, no copyright, no government regulations, hardly a lobby to speak of, and no monopolies of any kind. They manage to lock biotechnology away from new entrants and to keep the cost of doing science in the stratosphere for establishment professionals, solely through the physical possession of the source DNA and by imposing contractual restrictions on those willing to sign them.

Schloendorn notes the parallels with the software market, which also suggests an obvious solution to the problem of exorbitant prices: open-source [sic] biological reagents. That is precisely what Schloendorn has created:

I have synthesized, manufactured, tested, and fully validated a collection of open source plasmids [small circular DNA strands] coding for some of the very basic building blocks of biotechnology. I do charge an initial purchase price to pay for storage, ongoing quality control, and the provision of a reliable source of these molecules. But there is no proprietary barrier of any type on their use. You may grow them on your own, modify them, give them to others, sell them, sell products derived from them, and do whatever you (legally) want to do with them.

What's fascinating here is to see the application of the business model commonly found in the world of open-source software whereby the code is freely available, and customers effectively pay for a service that provides quality control in the world of DNA. Given the easy profits that will be put at risk by this new offering, we can probably expect the same kind of scaremongering and lobbying from the incumbents that free software experienced when it became clear that it posed a serious threat to the traditional, high-margin world of closed-source code.

[Editor's Note: The submitter pointed out that the article contains references to "Open Source" - where there is no source code. More correctly, this should refer to free, libre open knowledge (FLOK).]