Re: [ba-unrev-talk] On Tournaments
Jack Park wrote:
> Is there an upside to this madness?
>
> 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. (01)
I recall an article in The Economist magazine a while back where a
doctor had
done a mathematical study of how long it was going to take the human
race
to map the proteins if the research groups involved didn't collaborate,
as opposed to if they did.
My memory is rusty but I recall that collaboration reduced the time
needed by some large factor. (02)
The arms race got 'U.S.' to the moon. It didn't, e.g., get the Africans
there at the same time. (03)
--
Peter (04)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jack Park" <jackpark@thinkalong.com>
To: <ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 3:56 PM
Subject: [ba-unrev-talk] On Tournaments (05)
> 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.
>
> Throughout my childhood, an ever-present tournament was known as the
"arms
> race."
>
> And now, this article
>
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000B39CC-B7DF-1D07-8E49809EC5
88EE
> DF&catID=2 at Scientific American, shows the latest in the arms race /
> tournament du jour: beating patents on genes.
>
> 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!
>
> 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).
>
> Is there an upside to this madness?
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> I think such tournaments should be elevated in importance in the unrev
> discussions.
>
> Jack
>
> (06)