NIH and ACS squabble over PubChem

The 25 April issue of Business Week has a brief news article on a squabble
between Chemical Abstracts and the NIH.

Greg Aharonian
                              ====================

WHOSE MOLECULES ARE THESE?
John Carey, BusinessWeek, 25 April, page 81

    The [250,000,000+ members] National Institutes of Health thought it had
a great idea for advancing science - but its concept is threatening the
world's largest scientific society. The plan: Put information about a
vast number of molecules, which could be used to probe genes and biological
functions, into a public database, dubbed PubChem. Scientists then could
use the data to uncover new drugs. The information would come from other
public databases, scientific papers, and publicly funded research.

    But the project has run into fierce opposition from the 158,000-member
American Chemical Society (ACS). The nonprofit group has its own database
of 22 million molecules, the Chemical Abstract Service, that typically
costs thousands of dollars to access and accounts for more than half of
the society's $421 million annual budget.

    The two databases are complementary, argues NIH's Dr. Francis Collins:
"We have no intention of duplicating information." But ACS complaints that
PubChem, which already contains data on 850,000 molecules, looks virtually
identical to its offering. "Do taxpayers want their money to be spent for
something that's already done well in the private sector?", asks ACS
Executive Director Madeleine Jacobs.

    The warring factions have agreed to try to work out a solution. "I
hope we can resolve this in a way that does not put us out of business.",
says Jacob.

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Yeah, move to India like the rest of us. For many years, CAS had three
advantages: dealing with the costs of computer power, dealing with the
costs of telecommunications, dealing with the costs of editorializing,
especially when compared to the government. The first is now irrelevant,
the second is now irrelevant, leaving only editorializing. And at least
for biochem information, the NIH does that pretty well. It becomes
easier for taxpayers to answer Jacobs' question YES. Also, the NIH
could easily give up PubChem to some public Internet group to do something
Wiki-ish. Hard to see how this can be amicably resolved.

A related controversy to be is that of patent office databases. If you
took all of the money spent on the PTO's database, the JPO's database,
all of the espacenet's in Europe, and built one global patent database
somewhere running on a bank of parallel processors, you could offer
better throughput, and with the monies saved in redundancy, offer more
value added information at the same cost to the global public.

None of this stuff is settled. Fun Fun Fun.

Received on Wed May 04 2005 - 00:10:19