Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology

Many good ideas, detached presentation (3.5 stars):
The author of this book (JH) has used her professional background in both law and biology to produce a comprehensive, closely-reasoned work. Drawing on Eric Raymond's software development dichotomy of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", she makes a passionate and intriguing case for replacing the hierarchical ("cathedral-building") style of usual corporate biotech R & D with collective, "bazaar"-based production (a/k/a "commons-based peer production" and "horizontally networked user innovation," @109), like that in open source software communities. It's clear that JH has thought through the pros, cons and implications of open source very thoroughly. In fact, quite apart from biotech, you can learn a lot about the business and legal aspects of open source software from this book. JH also makes many imaginative and potentially fruitful suggestions about how open source biotech tools could be exploited to help address tropical diseases, or be of use to (and perhaps be financed by) generic pharmaceutical firms, for example. Throeughtout, she pays attention not only to "red", health-related biotech, but also "green", agricultural biotech (albeit omitting "white" biotech, for industrial applications). That the successes of open source biotech to date have been few and far between, and have largely related to IT or digital content rather than to "wet" technology, does take some of the fizz out of the topic by the end of the book. But there's still a lot of interesting content buried here, and as for applying it, maybe someday someone might get it right. If you're interested in intellectual property, a book like this could be exciting and stimulating. Unfortunately, this book falls short of that. The reason is the presentation, which has weaknesses at several levels. Starting at the most literal one, the book reads like a re-purposed Ph.D. dissertation, full of roadmap talk for disoriented senior faculty ("At the start of the last chapter, I highlighted ... So far this chapter has focused on ... In answering these objections I have argued..." -- all in one paragraph @ 218). The chapter subsections are rather long, and tend to contain lists of factors, arguments, reasons, etc. that are analyzed in turn; these actually could have benefitted from more formatting, such as numbering or captioning. A bit deeper, there's the problem of jargon. The typical reader is assumed never to have negotiated a licensing deal in his or her life; deal terms and the sensitivities of each are explained nicely in the early chapters. However, he or she *is* assumed to be familiar with the usual jargon of the "law and economics" approach to IP; terms like "rents" and "transaction costs" are thrown around long before they are defined (if ever). Most proponents of L & E are too young to realize how recently this way of looking at law has come into vogue, and how irrelevant it is to the practical business world. Believe me, one can profitably spend decades doing IP transactions, and a bit of patent prosecution, without ever needing to think of patents as "a way of preempting market failure resulting from the 'free rider' problem" (@71), or worrying about transaction costs or even "governance" (@109ff). Even worse, most references to biotech technologies are inadequately explained, such as "germplasm", "GURTs" and "diversity arrays technology". The unexplained jargon is symptomatic of the abstract style of JH's presentation. How is a reader supposed to sink his or her teeth into a sentence like "(A)t least one agricultural biotechnology firm has made a modest success of exploiting a patented platform technology using an open-source-like nonproprietary strategy" (@272) if none of the company, the technology nor the strategy are named? Although a few companies are named, especially in the last couple of chapters, vague generality is more the rule than the exception. Most unfortunately, the abstraction morphs into detachment. When JH mentions, e.g., that IP can "make traditional agricultural practices such as the saving of seeds difficult or impossible" (@102), she never shifts her gaze from the "practice" to the people who practice it, or their plight. Or consider a description of a paper arguing that Bayh-Dole "has created a misalignment of university technology transfer offices and public interests that benefit the the innovation system at large and enable access to intellectual property rights for humanitarian purposes" (@275). Within the confusing, albeit parsable, sytntax, JH focuses on the benefits (or lack of same) to "the innovation system" through access to "rights". What the book all too rarely mentions is an interest in benefiting *people* through improved access to *stuff*. By the end of 330-odd pages of main text, the reader has slogged through a litany of theorists, countless arguments, counter-arguments and refutations, and innumerable narratives about costs. You can also learn something about how open source biotech could, in theory, make life more fun or profitable for people engaged in biotech research and product development. If you're interested in learning how it might benefit sick or hungry people, though, that's left entirely to your imagination: such folks don't merit a mention in this book. One hopes they are JH's main concern too; but if so, she's done a poor job of communicating it. PS (2008/04/13): Shortly after posting this review, I had some very gracious feedback from JH. Based on our correspondence, it seems she does share the concrete social concerns, as well as an awareness of the drawbacks of an abstracted style, mentioned above. Since that input is an "externality" to this book, I haven't modified my review beyond adding a postscript. But it does make me look forward to her next one.