Biohackers

The Politics of Open Science

Alessandro Delfanti

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781849649070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Biohackers explores fundamental changes occuring in the circulation and ownership of scientific information. Alessandro Delfanti argues that the combination of the ethos of 20th century science, the hacker movement and the free software movement is producing an open science culture which redefines the relationship between researchers, scientific institutions and commercial companies. Biohackers looks at the emergence of the citizen biology community 'DIYbio', the shift to open access by the American biologist Craig Venter and the rebellion of the Italian virologist Ilaria Capua against WHO data-sharing policies. Delfanti argues that these biologists and many others are involved in a transformation of both life sciences and information systems, using open access tools and claiming independence from both academic and corporate institutions.

1

Cracking Codes, Remixing Cultures

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

‘The hacker manifesto’ (The Mentor 1986)

Crack the code, share your data, have fun, save the world, be independent, become famous and make a lot of money. There is a link between contemporary scientists devoted to open biology and the ethics and myths of one of the heroes of the computer revolution and of informational capitalism: the hacker.

In this book I show the existence of a confluence between the Mertonian ethos, the famous account of scientist’s norms of behaviour proposed in the 1930s by the science sociologist Robert Merton (1973) and the hacker ethic, a very diverse and heterogeneous set of moral norms and cultural practices whose foundations are based upon the desire to have a free and direct approach to technology and information.

The hacker ethic emerged in the 1960s within the first hacker communities in the United States and while different versions of it have been formalised in several books, manifestos and writings, what makes hacking interesting today is exactly the wealth and diversity of practices and cultures it represents. The emerging open science culture I point out is influenced by this wealth, as it mixes rebellion and openness, antiestablishment critique and insistence on informational metaphors, and operates in a context of crisis and transformation where the relationship between researchers and scientific institutions, and their commercialisation and communication practices, are redefined.

In this book I refer to biohackers – life scientists whose practices exhibit a remix of cultures that update a more traditional science ethos with elements coming from hacking and free software. It is well-known that cultures related to hacking and free software are indebted to the modern scientific ethos. Yet what I want to show is how hacking and free software are now contaminating scientific cultures, in what we could somehow be defined as cultural feedback. This process of coevolution is linked to the widespread and deep influence computers have on the scientific enterprise. In fact, the stories this book contains are related to the creation of genomics databases and community labs, and the use of online sharing tools and open source solutions.

Beyond the analysis of communication tools, I will explore a world in which the emergence of new scientific communities and new alliances between different actors are changing the landscape of scientific production. The sharing of genomic data through open access databases, the cracking of DNA codes, the standardisation of biological parts or the production of open source machinery for biomedical research represent one side of a process that also involves institutional change and challenges some of our assumptions about the relationship between research, commerce and power. A cultural shift lies at the centre of these transformations. Therefore, while one of the main problems analysed in this book is the widespread adoption of open access and open source solutions by biologists, my goal is to show that their relationship with hacker and free software cultures is deep and in some cases straightforward. In this way I tackle two main problems, one of which is the role of open science within the framework of informational and digital capitalism. The complexity of open science politics goes beyond the opposition between openness and closure and pushes us to look for a deeper understanding of today’s transformations in biology. The other is the evolution of scientists’ culture and how it interacts with the way science is done, distributed, shared and commercialised.

The three cases I present in this book are meant to exemplify the many different directions open biology is taking. Craig Venter, the US biologist known for his role in genetics’ commercialisation and subjection to secrecy and intellectual property rights, sailed the world’s oceans in order to collect genomics data and information he would then, for the first time, share publicly through open access databases and journals. The Italian virologist Ilaria Capua challenged the World Health Organization’s policies on access to influenza data by refusing the institution’s offers to upload its research group’s data on avian influenza genomics on a password-protected database. Both Venter and Capua founded their own independent open access databases, although their goals were completely divergent. The rise of a do-it-yourself biology movement in the United States, DIYbio, was based not only on the American amateur science tradition, but also on explicit references to hacking and open source software from which it borrowed practices that it then applied to the life sciences.

I must stress that I do not use ‘hacker’ as a native category; in fact, most biologists that use open science tools and practices do not define themselves as hackers. Among the cases I present, only DIYbio has explicit relationships with the hacker tradition. In other cases, as will become clear in the following chapters, hacker cultures represent a source of innovation and contamination of scientists’ cultures. Yet all three cases represent a move towards a more open informational environment and also a critique of the current system of the life sciences. Finally, they all have very different relationships to issues such as commercialisation, profit, or autonomy from institutions.

These cases are not meant to be interesting from the viewpoint of their scientific output – that would somehow go beyond my capacities. Also, it would be difficult to compare the scientific output of high-profile individual biologists such as Venter and Capua with such a diverse and decentralised movement as DIYbio, which may never become an important place for innovation. While I am aware that my choice could be seen as asymmetrical, I believe the juxtaposition of these three cases helps me to reach the main goal of this book. Indeed, by analysing both discursive strategies and socio-economic practices of contemporary biologists who use open science tools, I investigate their role in the changing relationship between science and society and try to give a multidimensional, stratified picture of the politics of open science.

The case studies I analyse are not impartial and are not generalisable, nor do they represent the whole spectrum of new open science practices, yet I argue that these biologists can all be a rich model for current transformations in both life sciences and informational capitalism. In particular, the culture to which I am referring gives scientists tools they can use in order to solve some of the political and societal problems raised by the increasing privatisation of genetic research by means of patents and other restrictions on accessing biological data. It can also be considered as an expression of a change in the institutional and socio-economic settings of contemporary biology: life sciences innovation now takes place in increasingly complex and mixed configurations, in which open data policies and open access tools coexist with different, and more strict, sets of access policies and intellectual property rights (IPR). Further, life sciences are now open to the participation of new actors, such as citizen scientists, start-ups and online collaborative platforms. These biologists have a role in hacking biology.

Hacking has an active approach to the shaping of the proprietary structure of scientific information – to who owns and disposes of biological data and knowledge. But it also poses a challenge to Big Bio¹ – the ensemble of big corporations, global universities and international and government agencies that compose the economic system of current life sciences – that aims at modifying the institutional environment in which biological research takes place by asking the question: who can perform biomedical research? Biohackers work against the high and well-defended thresholds to access that characterise Big Bio institutions. The skyrocketing costs of setting up a biomedical research laboratory, the increased complexity of biological research, the formal education required to work in a university or corporate lab, the complex bureaucracies that run scientific institutions, the legal and technological obstacles that prevent most people from accessing biomedical information have all been subject to attacks in the name of openness. Openness thus does not refer simply to access to information, but also to institutional change towards more open environments.

In fact, today the word ‘open’ has become an umbrella term that may refer to very different practices. In this book I use the expression ‘open science’ to describe a broad range of practices that include open source, open access, citizen science and online cooperative science or science 2.0. Intellectual property rights such as copyright, patents and trademarks grant owners exclusive rights to immaterial assets such as musical or literary works, inventions and designs. But during the last couple of decades alternative intellectual property rights have emerged as new forms of IP protection that allow widespread sharing and reuse. The term ‘open source’ refers to methodologies that promote the ‘free redistribution and access to an end product’s design and implementation details’² and in the biomedical sense should strictly refer to the use of legal licenses and technological platforms that allow access, sharing, reuse, recombination and modification of biomedical data such as genomic sequences. Yet ‘open’ has been used to define practices of free access and participation broadly (Hope 2008). Open access is an expression related to access to scholarly publications vis-a-vis the traditional system of journals that function according to a subscription fee model. There is an open science based on external collaborations or characterised by broader autonomy from institutions, for example, in the case of citizen science projects. Science 2.0 usually refers to any practice of cooperation carried out by means of online collaborative tools.

‘Open science’, in sum, includes all these different and somehow heterogeneous practices. Hence, when analysing open science I do not focus only on intellectual property rights, but more generally on the practices that foster access to the production of scientific information and knowledge. Thus, in this book we will embark on a journey through the very different ways in which science can become open and free. We will see how open science can be detached from the control of bureaucracies, but also represent a business and marketing model, and how it can widen citizens’ access to scientific knowledge or even become a resistance practice.

THE TRAGEDY

The most common narrative about open science tells us that, once upon a time, science was an ethical enterprise: sharing, equality, disinterest and the common good drove the everyday work of scientists. Then evil corporations entered science and changed the rules of the game, patenting life, enclosing the commons, and eventually destroying the willingness to share data, information and knowledge. But today, so the story goes, we have new tools that together with the old open science spirit can be used to rebel against evil, defeat it and allow scientific knowledge to flow freely again. These tools are open source and open access science, and they can be used to tear down the barriers to the access of scientific knowledge.

The expression ‘tragedy of the anticommons’ comes from a paper published by Science in 1998 (Heller and Eisenberg). According to this formula, the proliferation of restrictions to access, patents and industrial secrets represents an obstacle to innovation. Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg reverse the classic perspective on the ‘tragedy of the commons’, Garrett Hardin’s 1968 work that has been used to justify the centralised management, or privatisation, of common goods. In a well-known passage Hardin stated that no pasture can be managed as a commons forever:

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. ... As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximise his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he ... concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another ... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. (Hardin 1968, p. 1244)

Hardin’s position has been criticised from several perspectives. On the one hand, according to the definition by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom (1990), the commons should be interpreted as an ‘institution for collective action’ and only a hasty and individualistic approach can lead to ruin. On the other hand, the informational commons famously have distinctive characteristics. Information is said to be a non-rival good: no cattle can get through an informational pasture, for using a piece of information does not prevent anybody else from using it. In fact, intellectual property rights are artificial enclosures needed to extract value from a resource that is indefinitely replicable.

According to Heller and Eisenberg, and their diametrically different perspective on the commons problem, the increase of patenting in biotechnology inhibits innovation forcing actors to navigate a complex and atomised territory where intellectual property rights owned by several distinct parties raise the cost of doing research.³ The cause of the anticommons effect is the fragmentation of property rights and the increased number and scope of barriers to access vis-a-vis the necessity of the ‘assembling of an assortment of complementary bits of knowledge and research tools, each of which might be owned by distinct parties’.⁴

Furthermore, according to social studies of science, anticommons are also a symptom of the changes in the link between science, capital and society. During the last decades of the twentieth century the relationship between private corporations and academic science has become stronger, causing a general reconfiguration of the roles and dynamics of scientific research. Commodification is part of a major shift that has affected the social relations of knowledge production (Nowotny et al. 2001; Hedgecoe and Martin 2008).

Finally, the rise of anticommons has been interpreted as a cause of the corruption of the norms of good science, expressed by the adherence to corporate values and goals by the producers of scientific knowledge.⁵ Patenting, secrecy and the quest for profit radically conflict with the norms of modern open science, namely with the ‘commitment to the ethos of cooperative inquiry and to free sharing of knowledge’ (David 2003, p. 3). The free and open dissemination of knowledge remains an important ideal associated with scientific progress. According to many authors and open access advocates, we need to couple the rise of new technological tools with a restoration of the modern open science culture. For Victoria Stodden, today’s open science movement is not updating the social contract of science: ‘what we’re doing is returning to the scientific method which has been around for hundreds of years. It is what a scientist is supposed to do’ (Stodden 2010b; see also Hope 2008).

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001), one of the main manifestos of the open access movement in scholarly publication, opens by combining the old open science culture and the new information and communication technologies:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.

But my point is exactly that ‘the old tradition’ of the open science ethos is not enough to understand the transformations we are facing. This narrative about a corrupted Eden and its redemption is too simple and static. In order to present a different viewpoint on this story, I refer to the hacker ethic in order to study three open biology research projects. Criticising the main narration related to the cultural basis of open science, I want to shed light on the transformations that are shaking today’s science: a new open science culture that is emerging among biologists, evolving from the twentieth-century Mertonian ethos but also comprised of several new cultural elements.

In his 1942 account of scientists’ behaviour, ‘The normative structure of science’, Robert Merton famously proposed what is now a classic list of norms of behaviour which govern academic scientist’s work and science’s functioning. The norms that guide research practices, later summarised by the acronym CUDOS, are communalism, universalism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism. These imperatives are linked to rewards given to members of the scientific community who follow them, and sanctions applied to those who violate them. Communalism means that scientific data are a common good and need to be shared freely. Individual creativity must be recognised in the form of authorship, not ownership. Universalism means that science cannot use criteria such as race, religion or personal qualities to evaluate scientific claims. Disinterestedness is a norm against fraud and against the intrusion of personal interests in scientific activity. Organised scepticism states that the whole scientific community must be able to check facts and ideas until they are well-established and recognised.

Autonomy and disinterestedness are also two of the main characteristics of Michael Polanyi’s ‘Republic of Science’ (1962). Polanyi uses the scientific community as a model for democratic societies. According to him, the free cooperation and self-coordination of scientists are directed towards the discovery of a hidden system of things, and the search for originality encourages dissent. The authority of the Republic is established ‘between scientists’, and not above them. But once established, authority does not need to be rejected. Rejection of authority happens during a crisis, during oppositional and controversial times in which scientists can decide to overthrow who reigns over the Republic.

Yet as historians and sociologists have pointed out, the Mertonian ethos is neither an accurate description of scientists’ work nor a set of moral norms scientists should follow. More recent work in the sociology of science has identified a number of problems in Merton’s proposal, namely in the importance of disagreement and controversies that are not deviations from a consensual norm but rather ubiquitous characteristics of the scientific enterprise (Collins and Pinch 1994; Laudan 1982). Furthermore, the norms of disinterestedness and objectivity can assume very different meanings for different scientists, and ‘counternormal’ behaviour that implies violations of Merton’s norms are frequent and often rewarded (Laudan 1982; Mitroff 1974).

Thus CUDOS norms are rather to be considered a means for scientists to position themselves within a precise historical social contract between science and society, as they serve as an ‘organizational myth of science’ (Fuchs 1993). Several authors have tried to put Polanyi’s and Merton’s n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Cracking Codes, Remixing Cultures
• 2 Forbidden, Public, Enclosed, Open Science
• 3 Hackers, Rebels and Profiteers
• 4 Sailing and Sequencing the Genome Seas
• 5 Just Another Rebel Scientist
• 6 We are the Biohackers
• 7 Conclusion: How to Hack Biology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index