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Failure and Memory

Ten years ago, right here in Indianapolis, Indiana, two men were having a conversation on the way to the airport. They suddenly realized that the old way of keeping quiet about medical research was entirely wrong.

Although the practice of medicine is designed to improve life and serve humanity, the business of medicine is steeped in the legal protection of patents, copyrights and trade secrets. The best way for a university lab or a private to recover their investment is to ensure that they can make enough revenue from the exclusive sale of their discoveries. For this new project, however, everyone agreed to do the opposite:

The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

“It was unbelievable,” said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

Photo © Flickr User Truthout.org

Sometimes, you have to toss out the old way of doing business and try something radical. In this case, researchers made what seems like an insane decision: purposefully fail to protect their intellectual property in the hopes that something greater might come out of working together.

It’s absolutely true that Failure is the secret to success. And in this case, the results are already on their way. From the same article in The New York Times:

Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease.

What are you ready to do wrong in order to get things right?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.