National Interest

The concept of open source software is well established in the computer world. A leading Australian scientist is using the same model to ensure that advances in genetic engineering are used for public beneft rather than private profit.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Terry Lane: Now I think it's true to say that there are two broad objections to genetic modification of useful plants. One of the objections can be summarised in that it kills butterflies, which is a sort of metaphor for the feared tendency of modified plants to spread sterility in the biosphere. The other objection is that GM is a science that favours big corporations, mainly American, and works against the interests of farmers, mainly in the poor countries. Well, we'll talk about genetic engineering but we'll forget the butterflies for the moment and we'll concentrate on the business aspects of GM and the tendency to monopoly control of modified organisms. What if you could have genetic modification without corporate monopoly? With me in our Canberra studios is Professor Richard Jefferson who reckons that you can have the benefits of genetic manipulation without the monopolistic consequences that worry us pessimistic Marxist depressives. Richard is the Director of CAMBIA, that's the Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture, an organisation affiliated with Charles Sturt University and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Richard, good afternoon.

Richard Jefferson: Hey, good afternoon, Terry.

Terry Lane: Now let's start with the concept. You'd better explain what open source is.

Richard Jefferson: Oh well, I'm glad we have a chance to start in exciting places like that instead of the usual genetic engineering issues.

Terry Lane: We'll forget the butterflies. We won't talk about butterflies.

Richard Jefferson: No butterflies, right. OK, there goes those notes. All right. Open source is a fascinating concept that some people are used to thinking of as free software and they think of it in the IT industry and software engineering but in fact it's extraordinarily pervasive, new mode of innovation. It's way beyond free, it's way into sharing. It's basically the ultimate democratisation of the ability to innovate and right now, the pointy end of the stick is in software, and we want to change that a bit.

Terry Lane: Explain, perhaps if you use the Linux project, as an illustration for how open source works.

Richard Jefferson: Splendid and actually to hear a touch about how it started is interesting and it shows where it may go. About I'd say about 15 or 18 years ago, a Marxist depressive named Richard Stallman at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pioneered a concept called free software. He was irate at monopoly control of software, manifest by copyrights, and manifest by the fact that it was closed. That it that the source code that allowed a creative person to tinker and make something better, was withheld by the nature of the software's provision, called compiled. It was withheld from tinkering and he found that a serious abridgement of his interpretation of human rights. And so he started the Free Software Foundation and he started what amounted to a movement to craft one's own software but he did a brilliant thing, and that is that he used intellectual property law, in this case copyright law, to actually build a community of sharing. Instead of the usual thought that intellectual property would deny people access, what this time he did was by developing something called the general public licence, as he and his colleagues crafted more and better software, they said, 'You can share it and you can share it with no financial cost, but' (and there's a big but) 'you have to agree to share your improvements with everyone else as well.' So it was a situation where great creative innovators were able to say, 'You may not steal this innovation but you can use it and when you do use it, you share it.' And that was a pioneering breakthrough and it led to the development ultimately of a sort of a proto operating system, in a sense a beginnings of an alternative to Windows and to the other industrial operating systems. But it wasn't until a young Finnish computer scientist named Linus Torvalds entered the scene that it became an absolute world changing initiative. What happened was that Linus, back in the early '90s, was toying with what's called the kernel, the guts of an operating system, and he went out into the internet which was in its early forms then, and said, 'Listen, I've got what I think is the beginnings of a something like Unix, which is a very popular commercial operating system, but I want to make it available for everyone. Anyone interested in helping?' So he made his kernel available out there but tied it to this general public licence (GPL) and within a matter of a couple or three years, there were literally tens of thousands of programmers trying to help to make a public good and keeping it bound as a public good with GPL. And now what do we have? We have the Marxist enterprises of IBM and Hewlett Packard strongly endorsing Linux as a major operating system and as a complement or alternative to Windows, to Microsoft.

Terry Lane: What's their motive do you think, Richard, is it just that they hate Microsoft, or are they really interested in making an operating system freely available to anybody?

Richard Jefferson: I think any sensible businessperson would have to grimace at the concept that either IBM, Hewlett Packard or Intel are in it purely out of philanthropy. They see that good business can be done without egregious terms. You don't have to have complete competition in testosterone mist to actually make money. You can actually say that the core tools of innovation, which would be the operating systems, the programming languages, the inter-operability standards, those tools themselves are needed by everyone, and they're going to be achieved ultimately by everybody but at a terrible cost. But if it's shared, then pretty much everyone has a chance to benefit by making applications that actually make money.

Terry Lane: I have to ask you one more question about the Linox model or the Mozilla model and that is that although I presume if you're a really clever computer geek, you can get hold of the operating system and you can make it work yourself, but there are commercial enterprises which have taken the Linux system, added their name to it - like Red Hat, is I think one, and Lindos, and there are couple of others - so there are companies which are profiting from this freely constructed operating system. Now on what basis do they get permission to do that?

Richard Jefferson: Oh, it's the nature of the licence and in fact one of the evolutions of the general public licence or the free software concept that turned into open source, was exactly the ability to accommodate proprietary interests and capital needs. As an example, if you've ever used Apple's new operating system, OS 10.3, it's utterly fabulous. I love it. One of the things that's fabulous about it, is it never seems to crash, and one of the reasons it never seems to crash is that they used as the core, an open source Unix-like operating system called BSD Unix. But the exciting thing about that Unix is it's open source but it was developed with a variant on the general public licence that said, 'You can use this for free, meaning no financial cost, you share improvements to the core technology with the whole community, but if you develop a proprietary enhancement that's your own and built into your own system, you can sell that, and good luck to you.' And the beautiful thing about it is it allows the good part of capitalism, meaning small, medium enterprise competition to occur, without the bad part, which is the giant barriers to innovate.

Terry Lane: Now let's talk about the application of this concept to biotechnology. First of all, there was presumably an area in which the developers of Linux could move that wasn't restricted by patents but the impression that we have is that Monsanto now have tied up with patents every possible approach to genetic engineering and that there's no room left for you to play in.

Richard Jefferson: Yes, it's pretty difficult I admit. And I wouldn't put all of it at poor old Monsanto's doorstep, though they certainly figure strongly into it. And also in developing this dialogue that involves corporations, remember that three of the six big multinationals involved in biotechnology and agriculture are European. So lest it seems too much that it's an American versus European criterion, we should remember that, and they own an awful lot of the intellectual property. So you're right, it's a very challenging landscape. So we have to do it in a sense in two halves. One is to understand the landscape that's out there in patents and the other is to envision ways forward that are potentially win-win, the way the Linux system has become.

Terry Lane: Have any of the patent owners threatened to sue you for infringement?

Richard Jefferson: No, they haven't, and in fact most of them are in very constructive dialogues with us. I've had three meetings with the CEO of Monsanto, a similar number with the top brass of Du Pont, Syngenta and other companies, because basically if one gets rid of the polemic about companies being evil and accept the fact that they're there and they're out there to actually produce products - whether it's beyond manipulating or addressing the market, that's another issue - nonetheless they have a lot of intellectual property, they have a lot of creative and very substantial science and quality assurance capacity. So the question is really how can you develop a culture change, a new business model that they can accommodate, which doesn't cause confrontation? If it does cause confrontation, I don't think anyone's going to win in this. So in fact I don't think they'll come after as hard because it's in their best interests to enjoy the fruits of this labour.

Terry Lane: One of the things about the application of the open source concept to the development of computer software, is that there has to be, presumably, a group of highly motivated and altruistic what will we call them - umpires, arbiters - who make sure that last night's contribution to the code, represents an advance, isn't going to cause mischief, isn't going to make people's computers blow up. Now in the field of biotechnology, the equivalent to that is, who's going to do the testing of the products?

Richard Jefferson: That's a marvellous question, and it's not a trivial one. I've got to say that anybody who can answer difficult questions in a single bullet point is probably pulling your leg. We can take in a sense the development of the Linux system and the countless other open source innovations as sort of a bellwether and let's say how could we create, how could we learn from their successes and their failures? I'll give you an example that's very tangible, Terry, if I can. Take the technology of genetic analysis. Let's not talk of genetic engineering; in fact this whole initiative called BIOS, is all about Biological Innovation for Open Society, not just genetic engineering. Let's take the example of genetic analysis. In other words, knowing who begat who when you do plant breeding, to know which is the parent of a particular apple or wheat or barley, so that you could make a better and more resistant productive crop. And that technology is one that's changing rapidly. And our institution, CAMBIA, has been very lucky to have a terrific tame in-house genius that has the same altruistic philosophy that you're hearing about in the open source movement, Andrzej Kilian, and he invented a technology that is world beating in the idea of genetic analysis. That is, using in a sense, genetic chips or small silicon chips to fingerprint germ plasm, so fingerprint wheat, or barley, or sheep or cattle, to actually know how do we possibly do very conventional breeding to get better crops? And he invented that and we did something very interesting that was inspired by how the open source model evolved and that is, we patented it, but we patented it and said, 'Anyone can use it for free, but you must share improvements'. And so the idea that there are people who are inventing at the cutting edge and deciding that it is not just altruism but it is satisfactory implementation of democracy that they're after: it works, and this is working beautifully. Even the Australian grains industry is benefiting from it enormously and Andrzej started the first biotech open source company called Diversity Arrays Technology Company, specifically to provide added value services. But the exciting thing is anyone else could start a company, using the same technology, because it's freely available.

Terry Lane: You're listening to The National Interest and I'm talking to Professor Richard Jefferson, who is the Director of CAMBIA, the Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture. Now before we get on to the implications for international agriculture, I did mention that you are supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and John D. Rockefeller was at one stage the most reviled monopoly capitalist in the United States, who even had laws passed to restrain him. When did the Rockefeller Foundation become so altruistic in its motives?

Richard Jefferson: Well first, as soon as it became a foundation, one of the features of American tax law and American foundation law, is that the Rockefeller Foundation, from its very inception, had to be extremely distinct in its operations and its style and its ownership and its patterns of disbursement of money, from the corporations that founded it. So for instance, in the US, if there were the equivalent of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which curiously there is, they have to be completely and totally distinct from the source of their money, which was originally the Microsoft shares that Bill Gates owned personally. So the same thing applies to the Rockefeller Foundation. The Foundation itself has a completely distinct identity manifest by its board of directors, which are usually august and wonderful individuals, including people like the actor, Alan Alder, or the 'cellist, Yo Yo Ma, and they're taken in new directions of philanthropy that have nothing to do with big oil.

Terry Lane: Or with creating new monopolies.

Richard Jefferson: There you go. In fact, they want to break them.

Terry Lane: Yes. Well now, getting to the issue of the application of what you were doing to international agriculture. Now I should have said that there's a third reason why people have misgivings about genetic modification or genetic engineering or biotechnology and that is because we just simply can't understand it. But I read a bit about what you're doing and I'm going to attempt a synopsis and then you'll correct me.

Richard Jefferson: Oh boy.

Terry Lane: But we're accustomed to thinking insofar as we have any popular thoughts at all about genetic engineering, it's based on the concept of taking a gene from on organism and introducing it into another organism where you don't think it has any relationship. Now I'm thinking here of course of the famous example of the gene taken from the fish and put into the strawberry to make the strawberry frost resistant and presumably it didn't work because the strawberry tasted like a sardine. But as I understand it, you're concentrating your research on genes that already exist in plants but may not be active in the particular plant which is being grown and looking at ways of switching on that gene. Is that right?

Richard Jefferson: That's actually a brilliant synopsis. It doesn't reflect our entire scope of work but it certainly reflects something of our philosophy, and that is that out there in the genetics that we have to work with, there's a huge amount of intrinsic diversity and a huge amount of potential, latent potential, in the genes that you or I have, or bananas or bureaucrats, well, let's not push it, and we have a certain opportunity to look at why is one plant different than another? Very often it's just the orchestration of the genes, it's not a matter of banging in completely new genes, it's a matter of changing the patterns of orchestration. And the toolkit, the capability of orchestrating those genes is something that is also latent in the plant or in the organism. So what we're trying to do is develop a toolkit that allows us to harness that capacity, so that for instance, let me give you a really tangible example. In West Africa, rice is an extremely popular component of the diet but Asian rice, which we like very much, and in fact many West Africans would choose to eat, tends to have narrow leaves and one of the biggest challenges in West Africa is weeds. Now in West Africa, rices are grown that maybe don't have the same cooking and eating quality but they have wide leaves. So they shade out the weeds and they can actually effect a better yield under challenging conditions. Well what if we could ask, as it were, or even demand, that the Asian rice we enjoy actually had wide leaves? It turns out that the grown and development of leaf is intrinsic to the genetics of the plant but a very subtle change, so subtle you wouldn't even be able to see it, is all that's needed when a plant evolves from a wide to a narrow or a narrow to a wide leaf. Can we master that technology? Absolutely.

Terry Lane: Absolutely. You finished on the word 'absolutely'. So what are the demands for modified organisms in the Third World? You've given that one example, what are the others, I mean like a wheat that will grow without water? What do they need that you think you can supply through this open source approach?

Richard Jefferson: Well actually, first, one of the most important features about open source is that it's about democracy. It's really not about a bunch of guys in suits fixing problems in the Third World. It's about the fact that you've got about 4-1/2-billion, 5-billion people at the bottom side of the economic pyramid who are as creative as you or I are Terry, and the issue is can we get tools into their hands for them to solve their problems? It's not about us feeding the Third World; it's about treating them with respect and allowing the Third World to do what it desires to do. This is a really key feature of this revolution we're trying to start because it really is capturing the creative capacity of people who are currently out of the loop. So rather than say the Third World needs this or that crop what I can say the Third World really needs is a little respect and a toolkit that allows them to operate without massive capital constraints. Right now you put it in the introduction Terry, you did it really well, saying that we think of it as being money driving modern science. And in fact our public agencies are gormless gits also because they seem to believe it too. And previously when we had what I call a representational technocracy where we used to have public agencies and small-medium enterprises we used to trust delivering new innovations, including classical modifications of crops and cropping systems, we seem not to any more. We only seem to see public agencies that are apologist for getting in bed with multinationals. And there may not be something bad about multinationals, if we have an alternative. I mean nobody really hates Microsoft, as long as they've got lots of opportunities to buy other stuff. And it's the same here.

Terry Lane: But there's no getting away from the fact that every State government in Australia is in competition with every other State government in establishing biotechnology research centres which they hope will have economic benefits for the State, rather than just doing good for mankind.

Richard Jefferson: You're pushing all my right buttons here, Terry. Economic benefits, and yet you hear the mewling cries that there's a triple bottom line that we have to consider. There's the economic issues, there's the social issues, and there's the environmental issues. So we hear it put out large in that beautiful copy that we see, in those lovely brochures from State and Federal government agencies, CSIRO, about this triple bottom line. And after they've said it, they ignore it. The issue is really, our public agencies and our small-medium enterprise, are perfectly poised to look very hard at the issues of social and environmental added value, not simply measurable economic short-term returns. So what I'd say is that we actually have a crisis in business management and business models that are unable to accommodate the true triple bottom line and we can get there without in a sense, throwing the baby out with the bath water. And the baby is absolute science and committed scientists but the bathwater is this appalling lack of bottle in the public agencies and the lack of understanding that you don't have to have big money to do big impact work.

Terry Lane: Richard the last question is, what have you produced? I understand that there are 40 scientists associated with the CAMBIA project and some money has obviously been spent on your research. Have you produced anything yet?

Richard Jefferson: Yes, quite a bit, and in fact Andrzej Kilian's invention is just one of them but it's a major one. Others that he's also been involved in, that I've been involved in, are the technique we were talking to you about, about amending genomes without putting in flounder genes, but others are a little bit more drum-beating. We actually have a lot of success with interacting with both industry and the public sector. The main tool in genetic engineering is one we were associated with developing but then we did something unusual in the early days and that is, we made it available to absolutely everyone, based on their ability to pay. So for instance, the Hawaiian Papaya Growers Co-operative of small farmers in Hawaii that were faced with a disastrous virus problem, they, using public sector colleagues at Cornell University in the US Department of Agriculture, they invented a solution to that. It wasn't Monsanto, it wasn't DuPont, it was a bunch of farmers and it was a creative university professor. And they used the technologies that we invented. And so this is becoming commonplace and we have actually been able to successfully intervene at the point of inventing tools. We're not very good I must say, at delivering finished products per se. We're extraordinarily good at developing tools and the other side, what we've delivered, we have the largest, fastest public access database on earth of patents. We've spent five years and a lot of Rockefeller Foundation's money, with some help from the grains industry of Australia, to develop a completely non-closed database of every patent we can get our hands on on earth. And it is fast and it's phenomenal, and that allows us to see something important. If you want to make something free, you have to know what's not.

Terry Lane: Richard thank you very much for your time. Next time you come you can bring your mandolin. You haven't got your mandolin with you I suppose?

Richard Jefferson: I do not.

Terry Lane: I could have asked you to play our intermezzo on your mandolin.

Richard Jefferson: I'd have loved it. And charged you.

Terry Lane: I read everywhere that this is your true interest, is playing the mandolin, and that biotechnology is your spare time job.

Richard Jefferson: Exactly.

Terry Lane: Richard, thank you very much.

Richard Jefferson: Yes, thanks, Terry, for having me on the show, I appreciate it very much.

Terry Lane: Professor Richard Jefferson who is the Director of CAMBIA, the Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture. It's a Centre which is affiliated with Charles Sturt University and as I said, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Guests

Dr Richard Jefferson
Founder and Chief Executive of CAMBIA, the Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture in Canberra.

Further Information

CAMBIA's website is at:
http://www.cambia.org/index.htm