[ba-unrev-talk] On Tournaments
In the book _Global Brain_ by Howard Bloom, a book essentially dedicated to
a discussion of how microbes have been such successful learning organisms,
one important property of learning organisms is shown to be the conduct of
tournaments. (01)
Throughout my childhood, an ever-present tournament was known as the "arms
race." (02)
And now, this article
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000B39CC-B7DF-1D07-8E49809EC588EE
DF&catID=2 at Scientific American, shows the latest in the arms race /
tournament du jour: beating patents on genes. (03)
By and large, pharmaceutical firms are patenting the genes they sequence.
Some of those patented sequences may have been funded by public money. The
patents, however, appear to have the weakness that they deal with the
sequence as it is teased out of the organism, not as it exists within the
organism. So, what happens if you simply cause the organism to do its thing
by itself, as opposed to harvesting the gene and using it alone? Voila! (04)
But, as an in any good arms race, there is the need to protect against the
circumvention. How? Voila, again. Patent the protein made by the
gene. Here again, you have patented something as it exists in a petri
dish. How, then to deal with that issue? You guessed it: let the organism
build and use the protein in situ. What a concept! As it turns out, the
phrase assigned to the therapy I chose for Leukemia was "immune response
enhancement" (which, by the way, used an Interferon molecule made by
causing e.coli bugs to express Interferon in large quantities, which, by
the way, was done with a patented molecule, which, again, by the way, was
circumvented by a competing pharma by simply swapping one atom in the
sequence, and, which, by the way, is reported to have resulted in a less
efficacious Interferon molecule -- go figure). (05)
Is there an upside to this madness? (06)
I think there is. My view is that the other arms race got us to the moon
and, for me, that's a good thing. (Yes, Martha, I do have a narrow world
view). My view of this biotech arms race is that we are getting ever so
much smarter with respect to biology and disease. For me, that's also a
good thing. (07)
Along the way, I have proposed the tournament hypothesis to the unrev
group. The brand I have proposed takes the form of tournaments associated
with a variety of important (tough, urgent, complex) issues related to OHS:
Collective IQ improvement metrics
Learning technology
OHS/DKR technology (08)
I think such tournaments should be elevated in importance in the unrev
discussions. (09)
Jack (010)