Future Files:World AIDS Day: Sharing Your PC Will Save Humanity
Posted On: 01 December 2005 By: Jay Oatway Filed Under: Franken-Life | Transhuman Horizons
With the recent media overkill concerning a remotely possible birdflu pandemic, it’s easy to lose sight of the real pandemic–HIV/AIDS. While the immune-system disease will continue to claim many lives, international disagreement over how to fight the global HIV/Aids pandemic has persisted on World Aids Day. So Portension will offer some suggestions: 
Today more than 40 million people carry HIV virus, which continues to mutate and evolve, making treatments more and more difficult. However, now you can put your spare PC power towards the cause and help untangle the ever mutating proteins, according to SmartMobs:
HIV/AIDS is a difficult virus to treat because of the many ways it can mutate. Trying to find candidate drugs is likewise complicated. World Community Grid uses swarm supercomputing to tackle the computatiional intractability. If you have a PC that you don’t use 100% of the time, you can contribute to the search for a cure.
That seems like a far more sensible use of PC downtime than helping SETI search for alien transmitions. Research into HIV has given scientist ground breaking new insights into the detailed workings of a retro-virus. Through these new found insights, we may be able to cure a host of genetic diseases, even counter the effects of aging. And of course, one day, cure AIDS. In fact, we have learned so much that we might even be closer than we think to curing the disease today, if so much of the knowledge and insights weren’t locked away by Big Pharma/BioTech, horded in an effort to claim glory and riches. But there is a way forward: the Science Commons. Like the Creative Commons, it promotes sharing of information as the greatest good for humainty (not the ultimate evil that the likes of Big Music and Big Pharma/BioTech claim it to be), according to John Wilbanks, Science Commons Executive Director [via Lawrence Lessig
Scientific articles are locked behind firewalls, long after their publishers have realized economic returns. This means that the hot new article about AIDS research can’t be redistributed much less translated into other languages (where it might inspire a local researcher to solve a local problem). The difficulties faced in relation to the "open access" of publications are easy compared to those presented when we consider access to tools and data. Published research indicates that nearly half of all geneticists have been unable to validate research from colleagues due to problems with secrecy and legal friction. So Science Commons works on these problems… We translate this into projects, with work in three distinctly different project spaces: publishing (covered by copyright), licensing (covered by patent and contract) and data (in the US, covered only by contract). We work on agreements between funders and grant recipients, between universities and researchers and between funders and universities�all in the service of opening up scientific knowledge, tools and data for reuse. We also promote the use of CC licensing in scientific publishing, on the belief that scientific papers need to be available to everyone in the world, not simply available to those with enough resources to afford subscription fees.
The cure will likely come from efforts outside the U.S. From a place that flaunts patent law. A place outside the restrictions imposed by corporate bean counters who refuse to allow a disease to be cured unless doing so will generate a lot of profit
