UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO DOTTORATO IN SCIENZA E SOCIETÀ Dipartimento di Matematica Ciclo XXIII GENOME HACKERS REBEL BIOLOGY, OPEN SOURCE AND SCIENCE ETHIC SPS/08 – M-STO/05 di Alessandro Delfanti Relatore: Prof. Adam Arvidsson Coordinatore del dottorato: Prof.ssa Paola Gario A.A. 2009/2010 Table of contents Part I Ch. 1 p. 5 Introduction: cracking codes, remixing cultures Ch. 2 p. 19 Forbidden, public, enclosed, free. A history of open science and its political economy Ch. 3 p. 47 Hackers, rebels and profiteers. Scientists’ cultures and digital capitalism Part II Ch. 4 p. 75 What Dr. Venter did on his holidays. Sailing and sequencing the seas of capitalism Ch. 5 p. 91 Just another rebel scientist. Ilaria Capua and the restoration of the ethic of science Ch. 6 p. 107 We are the biohackers. DIYbio and the rise of garage biology Ch. 7 p. 125 Conclusions: how to hack a genome Bibliography p. 133 Part I 3 4 * 1* 1 Introduction: cracking codes, remixing cultures Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. The Hacker Manifesto, 1986 Crack the code, share your data, have fun, save the world, be independent, become famous and make a lot of money. In this study I link the public image of contemporary scientists devoted to open biology to the ethics and myths of the hero of the computer revolution and of informational capitalism: the hacker. I suggest the existence of a remix between the Mertonian ethic, 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 set of moral norms that emerged in the 1960s within the first hacker communities in the United States and was formalised for the first time in 1984 by Stephen Levy in his bible of hackers’ history (Levy 2010). I point out an emerging open science culture that mixes rebellion and openness, anti-establishment critique and insistence on informational metaphors and operates in a context of crisis (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006, Bourdieu 2004, Swidler 1986) where the relationship between researchers, scientific institutions and intellectual property is redefined. 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 opposition between openness and closure is not the only problem to consider if we want to understand today biology’s transformations. The other is the evolution of scientists’ culture and how it interacts with the way science is done, distributed, shared and commercialized. Indeed, by analysing both discursive strategies and socioeconomic practices of contemporary biologists who use open science tools, I investigate their role in the changing relationship between science and society. The case studies I analyse are not impartial and not generalisable, yet I argue these biologists can 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 rhetorical tools they can use in order to solve some of 5 the political and societal problems raised by the increasing privatisation of genetic research by means of patents and other restrictions to access to biological data. It can also be considered as an expression of a change in the institutional and socioeconomic settings of contemporary biology, in which open and closed models of intellectual property coexist a in a complex configuration. Finally, I point out these biologists’ role in hacking biology. Hacking as an active approach at the shaping of the proprietary structure of scientific information - who owns and disposes of biological data and knowledge? But also as a challenge to Big Bio, the ensemble of big corporations, global universities and international and government agencies that compose the economic system of current life sciences. A challenge that aims at modifying the institutional environment in which biological research takes place. The tragedy The most common, and naïve narrative about open science tells us that once upon a time, ethics in science was a good thing: 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 anticommons» comes from a famous 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,» 1968 Garrett Hardin’s widely cited paper that has been used as an example of the necessity of centralized management, or privatization, 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 6 herdsman seeks to maximize 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 criticized from several perspectives. On one hand, according to the definition by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom (1990), the commons should be interpreted as an «institution for collective action» that only a hasty and individualistic approach can lead to ruin. On the other hand, 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 (Lessig 2002). 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 atomized territory were intellectual property rights owned by several distinct parties raise the cost of doing research. 1 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 «assembling of an assortment of complementary bits of knowledge and research tools, each of which might be owned by distinct parties» (David 2003, p. 13; for an example of anticommons in genomics see Maurer 2006). Furthermore, according to social studies of science anticommons are also a symptom of the changes in the relationship between science, capital and society. As seen in Helga Nowotny’s Mode 2 Science (2001), or John Ziman’s Post-Academic Science (2000) the relationship between corporations and science has become stronger, causing a general reconfiguration of the roles and dynamics of scientific research. 1 Other studies suggest that anticommons caused by gene patenting have never materialized, even though those fears continue to have an important effect on policy making (Caulfield et al. 2006) 7 Commodification is part of «a major shift in the social relations of knowledge production» (Hedgecoe and Martin 2008, see also Hilgartner 1995). Finally, the rise of anticommons has been interpreted as a cause of corruption of the norms of good science, expressed by the adherence to corporate values and goals by the producers of scientific knowledge. 2 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). And 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.