Capitalizing on New Needs and New Opportunities Government-Industry Partnerships in Biotechnology and Information Technologies (2001) / Chapter Skim
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II. Issues in Biotechnology and Information Technology
II. Issues in Biotechnology and Information Technology
Pages 33-50
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II ISSUES IN BIOTECHNOLOGY and INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
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Innovation, which maintains U.S. technological leadership and helps to sustain economic growth, depends in turn on a policy framework that encourages basic, applied, and multidisciplinary research.
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Partnerships have also been a mechanism for promoting multidisciplinary research another strong trend underlying research in both sectors. Finally, differing uses of patent protection provides another perspective for reviewing the impact of public policy on the biotechnology and information technology sectors.
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EUV promises a means of continuing the remarkable pace of advance in the capacity of computer chips, as captured in 3It is important to distinguish between the role of federal R&D funding in the fifties versus its less prominent role in the late seventies and eighties. Kenneth Flamm extensively documents the significant federal role in providing R&D support to leading firms.
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between the Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and the leading SEMATECH companies, such as Intel, Motorola, AMD, and Infineon, to which industry contributes $100 million a year.7 Expanding on Dr. Moore's discussion, Kenneth Flamm provided evidence of recent trends in government funding for computers.8 The computer industry benefited from significant federal support in the years following the Second World War, with the government encouraging private sector initiatives, serving as the primary market for most early machines, and developing much of the basic architecture of today' s computer.9 As the commercial market for computers grew in the 1960s, the government's role in supporting R&D evolved, with the government continuing to push the leading edge of technology through support for advanced research and as a consumer of high-performance machines.
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Intellectual Property Protection The intellectual property regime, which structures the incentives to innovate and the ability to capture innovation's fruits, is another important piece of the policy puzzle. There have been a number of changes in intellectual property policy and practice in recent years.
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Policy Concerns Apart from reviewing past support for the biotechnology and information technology sectors, conference participants and paper authors identified a variety of policy concerns related to the federal research portfolio and patent laws. 1lThe Bayh-Dole University and Small Business Patent Act of 1980 changed the intellectual property landscape and altered the nature of collaborative relationships between university and industry.
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McGeary raises "the question of whether the federal research portfolio has become 'imbalanced."' He finds that federal support for biomedical research has expanded substantially relative to that in most fields of the physical sciences and engineering. Noting that overall federal funding for research was flat in real terms from 1993 to 1997,13 McGeary finds that the Administration and Congress over that period increased the budget for the National Institutes of Health which provides more than 80 percent of the federal support for the life sciences.
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President Bush pledged to continue the doubling effort and proposed an increase of 13.5 percent in FY 2002. DHHS Secretary Tommy Thompson recently pledged an increase of $4 billion in FY 2003 to reach the doubling target of $27 billion.
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He recounted that in some instances, courts have been applying patent law doctrine developed for the synthetic chemical industry to biotechnology including patents on DNA sequences and other things found in nature. This practice is problematic when applied to biotechnology, he noted, since biotechnology directly concerns research tools, rather than consumer products.
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Administering medical treatment over the immense distances of space will require remote sensing, highly sophisticated software, and advanced robotic technology. Developing such technology is, perhaps, the largest challenge facing biologists and computer scientists today.
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Functional Genomics Functional genomics, which Mark Boguski discussed, is an example of an approach to closing the gap between biology and computing that will push innovation in computing, while enabling biology to realize the benefits of the Human Genome Project. Functional genomics uses computing technology to model organisms (using data from the human genome)
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DARPA is also considering putting electronic chips on insects in order to track their hunting patterns for use in developing search algorithms for Department of Defense sensors. Realizing Synergies in Biology and Information Technology The combination of breakthroughs in computing technologies along with the sequencing of the human genome offers exciting possibilities.
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Capturing the full potential of existing investments requires additional multidisciplinary research collaboration among biologists and computer scientists, as well as among those active in related disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, and electrical and chemical engineering.20 While the research community seems well aware of these challenges, more needs to be done to educate policymakers on this issue. A further implication is the need for interdisciplinary training.
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This initiative brings together a variety of disciplines in the same location to address research problems, such as improved gene chips and computational methods for analyzing the data that the gene chips produce. Building bridges across disciplines is a long-term effort.
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Six NIH institutes, along with the Wellcome Trust and several pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, fund MSC.23 The SNP Consortium, created in 1999, seeks to map genetic variations within the human genome in order to increase the understanding of their role in causing disease. SNP was formed at the initiative of the Wellcome Trust, which provided substantial funding and convinced 10 competing companies to contribute funding.24 In both cases, as with the Alliance for Cellular Signaling, the results are being made public.
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