DIYgenomics - open science resources

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General information:

• @boraz PLoS
• http://scienceforcitizens.net/
• Blog post follow up to the Science Online conference, where citizen science was a prominent topic: http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2010/01/making_it_real_people_and_book.php

Information provided by Joseph Jackson:

• http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1114371   This paper, Open Source drug discovery, Finding a Niche, by Stephen Maurer.... gives a good history and discussion of models.  
• Polio vaccine is often cited but ironically Salk may have been unable to get a patent on it anyway.  Eradicating small pox--more a public health achievement I suppose.  
• Of course, India's Open Source Drug Discovery initiative and the recent "hackathon" for TB is a good example  http://www.osdd.net/news-updates/callinggeekstotheosddhackathon   I think they ended up with 2000 people participating.  
• Michael Nielsen tracks all this stuff and at Singularity Summit cited the example of crowd-sourced mathematics.  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.html , http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/doing-science-online/
• BioBricks I guess is an example, but has yet to deliver anything spectacular.  BioFab has been funded to try to clean up the registry.  http://www.biofab.org/       You could site iGem maybe as a related example.  
• Chris Kelty's essay Free Science is an older, but good statement of the topic.  
• Freeman Dyson's piece  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20370   but this is more speculation about how great open biology could be. 

• Synaptic Leap/ Tropical Disease Initiative hasn't really taken off.  Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, DNDi and One World Health are more just virtual Phrama but sort of related--proves you can develop a drug at much less cost than the stated 800 million or 1 billion.  Myelin Repair Foundation has a good talk at Bil:Pil where the guy explains they basically use an open source style model only limited to the confines of the organization.  They got a candidate target ready to license in only 5 yrs vs typical 10-14.  The reason this worked so efficiently is because of the unique collaboration they coordinated among their participants.  http://bilpil.com/
• PIRPA, public resource for intellectual property in agriculture tries to address access to molecular biology technologies for humanitarian purposes.  
• Finally, Sage Bionetworks of course got a lot of buzz and $... will be a while before it produces something.   

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