I've just finished to read the novel "next" from Michael Crichton... I know it's a novel, but the author focused the attention to the patenting of genes that leads some diseases to be properties of a single pharmaceutical industry.
That is leading me to ask myself if we are truly crunching to make results freely available to all scientists or if our volunteer help is donated to big pharmaceutical industries / universities to create commercial drugs.

What are the opinions of Rosetta@home staff about statements that the author wrote at the end of the book? (If you didn't read that they are: stop genes patenting, do guidelines for using human tissues, do laws to make publicy available results of genes testing, delete research prohibitions, delete Bayh-Dole law).

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I'm not Rosetta staff, but i'll answer anyway.

I don't know what Bayh-Dole law is, but the rest of the statements seem pretty good to me. I wasn't aware there was such a thing as gene patenting. Hypothetically, if someone patents the entire human genome, would that mean that you are violating their patent if you reproduce?
Making results available to all scientists would include big pharmaceuticals but I don't really see a problem with that. A protein structure being determined by Rosetta, would prevent it from being patented by anyone else (?), so Rosetta is a step in the right direction, I believe.

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the problem is if the results from projects like R@H aren't patented then the pharma companies would never invest in producing the drugs as they have to invest huge amounts of money to get drugs to market. If they have no protection on that investment and anyone else can come in and compete once they've done all the R&D, then they'll never invest in that drug in the first place... there are ways to control this, but the pharma companies need some form of guarantee of return.

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