A couple of years ago, a contributor to the BioForge forum, ‘Meredith’, asked me why Monsanto would ever participate in the BiOS Initiative or any other open source idea. I decided to repost an edited form of my reply here, since many others ask the same question. Well, Monsanto STILL hasn’t signed [...]

Posted on February 28th, 2008 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: BiOS Licensing, Patents, Science, Social Enterprise | 4 Comments »

Well, its been a busy few months since my last post. I’ve been constantly traveling to meetings and working with prospective partners to try to generalize our work.
It now seems that the fundamental power of a harmonized patent informatics platform and a facility for supporting open innovation work has become widely appreciated. [...]

Posted on September 5th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: General, Patents, Science, Social Enterprise | No Comments »

Almost all technologies in the life sciences are intertwined and interdependent. Few discoveries stand on their own, and fewer inventions. Not only do they each depend on the pre-existing knowledge base, they almost always incorporate components of many other technologies in their execution.
This is particularly true for tools and technologies that [...]

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: BiOS Licensing, General, Patents | No Comments »

In two weeks - April 19th - I’ll be at another conference in Melbourne, the World Congress of Science Journalists. At that congress, I’ll be producing a session about who benefits from science in a world where virtually every scientific discovery and platform is patented, and the elephant in the room: capability to use [...]

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: General, Patents, Science | No Comments »

I made a presentation at the A2K meeting last year called Mapmakers and Mariners, Shipwrights and Sailors. I had prepared it while sitting on the stage listening to the other speakers (my preferred mode of preparation). it was inspired by a conversation I had with a fine journalist named Kenn Cukier.
In that discussion we were [...]

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: Patents, Science, Social Enterprise | No Comments »

I attended a meeting called A2K (Access To Knowledge) held at Yale last year (Conference Wiki).   I got to hang with some friends whom I admire, like Yochai Benkler (one of the organizers) and to get to know some remarkable people, like Shay David - a clear and articulate thinker who has since visited [...]

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: BiOS Licensing, General, Patents, Science, Social Enterprise | 1 Comment »

We all know the answer, of course. And it bears on the question of the unpalatable abuse of the patent system. Why do these people do it? Same answer.
I was working with CAMBIA’s Patent Lens team on the forthcoming ‘landscape’ of patents around plant genes, and stumbled on a newly [...]

Posted on April 3rd, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: Patents | 1 Comment »