Monthly Archives: October 2007

Go ahead and play.

From Nature News:

When scientists released a draft of the human genome sequence six years ago, they said the data belonged to all of us — but until now, they have been the only ones able to play with the data therein.

I call bullshit. That data has been publicly available, you can download it from NCBI’s FTP site. Go ahead and play.

It makes me sad that most research is published under restrictive copyright licenses and is generally inaccessible to the public. But the fruit of the Human Genome Project *is* available. Find a different hyperbole, please don’t needlessly promote the image of science as a monolithically inaccessible tax dollar sink.