PRAGOTI

One of the key determinants of today’s world is the speed with which innovation takes place and is
brought within the sphere of production. The growth of technology is a continuous driver of the
economy. While a lot of discussions have taken place on the monopoly created through the
“reproduction” of the innovation via patents, much less attention has been focussed in the way
innovation takes place and the structures within which innovation is either facilitated or retarded.
Does the networked world of today carry new possibilities for alternate structures of creating
knowledge and innovation that are currently being retarded? Is it possible to expand the notion of
“commons” to help such processes develop?
A number of recent cases in the United States Supreme Court and in the US Federal Court dealing
with patents have shown that companies investing heavily in advanced technologies are moving away
from the patent model. A major exception to this is the big pharmaceutical company sector. The
argument against the current patent regime for companies involved in innovation is that the
increasingly networked character of producing scientific and technological knowledge comes up
against the requirements of a patenting system: the bang is not worth the buck involved in patenting.
The technology model of generating innovation was conceived to be “private” from the beginning.

The patenting system originated in the days of the lone inventor and the need to protect his/her
invention. Historically, the lone inventor has given way to large corporate or state funded research
laboratories in the early twentieth century. Increasingly, science institutions have been also looking at
producing knowledge in profit-oriented ways similar to those used by global corporations in creating
new technologies. With the Bayh-Dole legislation in the US, this model has come to dominate
publicly funded science in the US. In India, as elsewhere, the belief that a direction the US has moved
in is a good one to go in is gaining ground.

Interestingly, this is also a time in which alternate models of generating knowledge and innovation
have gained ground. The Free Software Movement has shown that networked and open collaborations
of “hackers” can produce software of far better quality that what the best of well-heeled corporations
working in isolation can manage. The power of open, collaborative structures, working without socalled
material incentives is visible in this model. The Free Software Movement has thus resurrected
older models that have played key roles in successful innovation in technology development, such as
the cases of the steam engine development in Cornish mines and the blast furnace developments in the
US.

In science, while results have been open and shared publicly, the competitive model has been the way
discoveries are made. The current contours of the scientific enterprise are defined by these
competitive notions of exclusive discovery. They have been consistent with reductionist paradigms, in
which small problems could be examined in isolation. Such models are unlikely to be adequate today.
Cooperation in the scientific community on a far wider scale than has been the case so far is critical if
major advances are to take place.

Today, the information technology sector has shown that new technologies and methodologies can be
developed by cooperative communities. It may be argued that this sector is unique in that the
“reproduction costs” of the “artefacts” – the software-- are relatively low. However, the question
needs to be posed whether it is possible to design such approaches for other areas such as, say, the life
sciences? Is it possible to have similar cooperative communities that work together to produce new
products? Is it possible to envisage ways by which artefacts can be reproduced and reach the
community without high costs of such “reproduction”? Are there spaces to be found in which new,
more intimately cooperative modes of scientific enquiry can be initiated?

What is needed is to explore new ways of establishing ‘creative commons’, in which new
technologies and methodologies are developed by cooperative communities. It is in this context that
we have thought to get together a set of practitioners from different disciplines to focus on production
of knowledge and innovation and examining what structures of knowledge production are in
consonance with the needs of producing new knowledge and innovation.
Some examples of these possibilities are given below.
Agribiotechnology: In order to explore such possibilities, a possible example would be the
development of useful crop varieties in the agribiotech sector. The bulk of ‘innovative technology’ in
this arena currently appears focussed in making genetically modified crops (GMOs, so to say), a
technology that is patent-protected by the MNC sector. An interesting step away from this corporate
model of agribiotech development has been the establishment of an ‘open source biology’ platform,
centred around new microbes useful for making transgenic plants. However, such a knowledge
commons approach may still depend on the conventional manufacturing sector for delivery of the
products – for example, the seeds -- to the market. Also, it still involves making transgenic crops,
which is a technology replete with implementation difficulties of both the political and the
environmental kind.

One alternate possibility that is being discussed globally is to take advantage of the growing ability to
sequence the entire genetic sequence of individual organisms at steadily declining expense. The
incorporation of such a step in traditional plant breeding for advantageous traits will allow the
breeding programmes to overcome some of the major obstacles to creating crop varieties with
advantageous traits that breed true so that seeds can be re-used. It would allow the identification of
combinations of genes that confer a particular trait and thus allow reliable selection of varieties with
combinations of many advantageous traits, and it would even allow the creation of carefully
engineered crops in which the introduced gene form providing advantage is not from some other
species but from the host crop itself. Such a programme would be of little interest to the profit-sector
since farmers can re-use seed. It would require little by way of a manufacturing intermediary, since
experimentally generated seed can simply be handed out to be bred by farmers themselves. And it is a
programme that would demand a large-scale cooperative global effort between breeders and scientists.

Breeders would need to collect and maintain source varieties and carry out careful breeding. Scientists
must, on the other hand, generate new ways of handling and interpreting the large mass of data that
sequencing-assisted breeding would yield, - essentially, cutting-edge science would result from the
enterprise as well.

Open Source Drug Discovery: A similar possibility exists in the area of drug discovery. The low
number of novel therapeutics entering the market in recent years shows that the conventional structure
of drug discovery is leading to lower productivity of research and declining innovation. Can opensource
drug research and development, using principles pioneered by the highly successful free
software movement, help revive the industry? As the cost of genome sequencing drops and the speed
at which the sequencing can be done increases exponentially, it is possible to harness this power to
solve the problems of health in radically different ways.
It is possible to process genomic information and on a much larger scale, create public databases of
genomic information and protein structures, identify promising protein targets, and deliver such
compounds for clinical trials. It would be based on a collaborative, transparent process of biomedical
development to take on health challenges that big pharmaceutical corporations have neglected in
favour of what they perceive as “block-buster drugs”. A number of interesting initiatives are currently
under way, from tuberculosis to malaria.

Of course, the structure of “reproduction” and creation of “commons” would need to be different from
that of software and agribiotech. There is need to develop structures that protect the public domain
and commons in this model of drug development as well as appropriate production structures that
would address the needs of those sections of the people who cannot afford the patented high cost
drugs emanating out of the current big pharma model of drug development.
This is not to say that there are no difficulties with the approach. Rather, it is to suggest a possible
example of ways in which the framework of present-day science and technology can be re-cast and
used in innovative ways for cooperative generation of useful knowledge. Obviously, each of these
areas would have their own specificities as well as demand creating new structures to protect the
knowledge commons. Some advances have taken place with the Free Software community’s creation
of the Gnu Public License. However, many more questions will need to be addressed not only to
protect the knowledge commons being created but also to create this open and cooperative
communities.

It is with this purpose that we have decided to hold a workshop in which we share the kind of
structures that are emerging in the above areas and potential of these structures. Some of the people
who have agreed to participate are:

Professor Abhijit Sen, Member, Planning Commission

Dr. Samir Bramhachari, Director General, CSIR

Shri SP Shukla, Former Member, Planning Commission

Professor Vijay Kumar, Open Knowledge Initiative and Director, Academic Computing, MIT

Professor Deepak Pental, Vice Chancellor, Delhi University

Prof. Satyajit Rath, National Institute of Immunology, Delhi

Prof. Rahul Roy, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi

Prof. T. Jayaraman, formerly Mathematical Institute of Sciences and currently TISS, Mumbai

Prof. Jayati Ghosh, Centre of Economic Studies and Planning, JNU, and Knowledge Commission

Prof. CP Chandrasehkar, Centre of Economic Studies and Planning, JNU

Professor G. Nagarjuna, TIFR and Free Software Foundation

Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya, IIT Delhi

Prof. Mohan Rao, Community Health and Social Medicine, JNU

Prof. Srinath Reddy, AIIMS and Public Health Foundation of India

Dr. Amit Sengupta, Secretary, All India Peoples Science Network

Dr. Sumantra Bhattacharya, Indian School of Mines

Prabir Purkayastha, Delhi Science Forum

The structure of the workshop:

9.30-10.30 AM

Inaugural session: Background and overview

Professor Abhijit Sen

Brief Presentation on the objectives of the workshop

Tea Break

10.45-12.15

Free and Open Source Software

Speaker: Dr. G. Nagarjuna

Discussant: Jaijit Bhattacharya, Kiran Chandra

12.15-1.30

New Paradigms in Science and Education

Speakers:Professor Vijay Kumar, T. Jayraman

Discussant: Venkatesh Hariharan, Andrew Lynn

Lunch Break

2.15 -3.30

Agribiotechnology

Chair: SP Shukla

Satyajit Rath

Other speakers awaiting confirmation

Tea Break

3.45-5.00

Open Source Drug Discovery

Chair: Professor Srinath Reddy

Speaker: Dr. Samir Bramhachari

Discussant: Dr. Amit Sengupta