Computing, Intellectual Property, and the Engineering of Our Future Health Systems
The Grand Challenges in Computing Research Conference 2008 Report, edited by John Kavanagh and Wendy Hall, has just been published by the UK Computing Research Committee. In my contribution at this conference, on “The impact of biosciences”, I wanted to look a little beyond the immediate horizon. Apart from the big question of where computing is going, I wanted to draw attention to the very major influence that biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and life sciences have brought to scientific research.
Each discipline has a unique contribution – the diversity of models in the case of computing, for example. But the bio and life sciences have come to tower above all others in the way that citation rates have become so important, as has team-based research, and the role of intellectual property.
So what I look forward to is how our information infrastructure can and should fuse with the health and life sciences.
From my Computing Research Grand Challenges intervention: “As generic drugs gain ground, could they become like software? There are many formal similarities between them. Maybe, too, drug development will need a new Google-Pharma information search and fusion infrastructure at its core, making use of information and data which will be increasingly in the public domain. Beyond that perhaps our health system will be based on a Google-Health information infrastructure, with the door opened at last to a much tighter merger of health and computerisation in terms of personalised health care.”
A most interesting overview of the way that intellectual property is evolving in the pharma sector, furnishing on the way plenty of food for thought about how our health systems could and should be run, is provided by a European Commission Preliminary Report on the Pharma Sector Inquiry (a 426 pp. document).
That our future health system has a considerable amount of relevance to current science and engineering is clear enough. I have sketched out in a recently published article some implications of this related to how research is carried out, and how it is funded, by comparing and contrasting the current situation with the past. This article is “Origins of modern data analysis linked to the beginnings and early development of computer science and information engineering“, published in the Electronic Journal for History of Probability and Statistics (vol. 4, no. 2, Dec. 2008). In this article I cover some of the evolving context of research and applications, including research publishing, technology transfer, and the economic relationship of the university and society.
