<story><title>What DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 really achieved (2020)</title><url>https://www.blopig.com/blog/2020/12/casp14-what-google-deepminds-alphafold-2-really-achieved-and-what-it-means-for-protein-folding-biology-and-bioinformatics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MauranKilom</author><text>&amp;gt; Consider, for example, the possibility that Alphabet decides to commercially exploit AlphaFold, for example — is it reasonable that they make profit off such a large body of research paid almost exclusively by the taxpayers? To what extent is the information created by publicly available research — made public, mind you, to stimulate further public research — belong to the public, and under what conditions could it be used in for-profit initiatives?&lt;p&gt;Maybe I have a wrong conception of what research is supposed to achieve, but commercializing new insights is &lt;i&gt;absolutely&lt;/i&gt; one of the intended outcomes. One would sure hope that taxpayer money isn&amp;#x27;t funneled into research to... just enable more research. At some point the public should tangibly benefit from it, which is not achieved by writing more papers.&lt;p&gt;This all notwithstanding the fact that DeepMind intends to make AlphaFold open source and available to the community.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>&amp;gt; but commercializing new insights is absolutely one of the intended outcomes.&lt;p&gt;This is a recent idea, dating back to the late 70s and implemented through the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act.  Before that research was research; development (and private research of course) was the province of business.&lt;p&gt;The Gradgrind mentality that all research must be commercialized has impoverished basic research; of what use is looking for gravity waves or new branches of mathematics (just look at the contortions university press offices go to to justify some new paper on quantum mechanics).&lt;p&gt;Speaking of which, QM is a perfect example of something that would have advanced very slowly had this attitude existed 150 years ago…yet it is at the heart of the semiconductor revolution!</text></comment>
<story><title>What DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 really achieved (2020)</title><url>https://www.blopig.com/blog/2020/12/casp14-what-google-deepminds-alphafold-2-really-achieved-and-what-it-means-for-protein-folding-biology-and-bioinformatics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MauranKilom</author><text>&amp;gt; Consider, for example, the possibility that Alphabet decides to commercially exploit AlphaFold, for example — is it reasonable that they make profit off such a large body of research paid almost exclusively by the taxpayers? To what extent is the information created by publicly available research — made public, mind you, to stimulate further public research — belong to the public, and under what conditions could it be used in for-profit initiatives?&lt;p&gt;Maybe I have a wrong conception of what research is supposed to achieve, but commercializing new insights is &lt;i&gt;absolutely&lt;/i&gt; one of the intended outcomes. One would sure hope that taxpayer money isn&amp;#x27;t funneled into research to... just enable more research. At some point the public should tangibly benefit from it, which is not achieved by writing more papers.&lt;p&gt;This all notwithstanding the fact that DeepMind intends to make AlphaFold open source and available to the community.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dogma1138</author><text>This can be applied to anything, Google couldn’t have been founded without decades of public research into computer science that was itself built on thousands of years of human knowledge.&lt;p&gt;Everything we do is built on top of what came before.</text></comment>