Trade secrecy versus the progress of science and the useful arts

(Click on image to read about "Guilds".)

Trade secrecy is not only anti-innovation, it is anti-science.

Science requires that the proponent of a new theory/hypothesis lay out all his/her cards on the table so that others can rigorously test it.

If you say that you have a new data encryption scheme that others cannot easily crack with current technology then put it out on the table and let the hackers have a go at it.

If you say that you have a new cancer treatment protocol that has higher efficacy, then put it out on the table and let the clinical trial labs actually field test it.

What Mr. Levy is proposing (in this web positing) is anti-science. It is the anathema of real science for biotech companies to forever hide their secret sauces and not let others test them.

This exactly why patents are necessary.

So that real science can take place on a transparent playing field.

So we can “promote” the progress of science and the useful arts.

Crash Landing on Planet of the Orange-Haired Apes

It already happened.
So get over it.
We ARE on the Planet of the Orange-Haired Apes.

The problem at hand is how to tell them ....
"Take your stinking paws off my science you damn simpleton primates!"

It would not be an insurmountable problem if it were JUST the leader of the "free world" who was scientifically illiterate.

Or if it was also the Supreme judges who were scientifically illiterate. (Which they clearly are.)

It's the fake news aping press that's the problem.
Even these critters, the ones who are supposed to stand guard at the gates and yell about the Emperor marching with no clothes on in cases where all other checks and balances have failed, they too can't get anything right. That is a grand scale insurmountable problem.

Take this Gawker article where the author gets it 180 degrees wrong.
It wasn't Justice Scalia who was half way off his rocker. It was the rest of the Supreme bench and the reporter as well. Scalia to his credit was having a tinge of doubt where in fact the rest of the Court was in the wrong chemistry class (the fake science class). An "isolated" molecular fragment is not identical to the long chain compound from which it was selectively cleaved. (Hint: methane is not "identical" to heptane. If you think otherwise you fail organic chemistry 101.)

Or take this other article posted under the name of the American Council on Science and Health.

They got part of it right in noting: "The [Supreme Court] Justices tried to simplify the argument by making analogies to things like chocolate chip cookies, Amazonian jungle plants [plucking leaves off banana trees] and [lathing] baseball bats."

But then they go on to back up one of the Justices: "Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that if someone invented a new way to extract the ingredients of a cookie, a company still wouldn't be able to patent its ingredients. I can't imagine getting a patent simply on the basic items of salt, flour and eggs, simply because I've created a new use or a new product from those ingredients, she said."

At the end to their credit, they question the wisdom of the Myriad decision: "... preventing innovators, even (or especially) in biologicals and biotechnology from making sufficient profit on their work will have a strong chilling effect on R&D in this field."

However, consider next this Richard Dwakins Foundation article... "In one puzzling opinion, he [Justice Scalia] admitted that he wasn’t sure whether he accepted the reality of molecular biology. In another, he wrote that “creation science” (that is, creationism) was a legitimate “body of scientific knowledge” and that public schools can teach “whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution.” And in a dissent contesting the federal government’s duty to combat climate change, he shrugged that the court’s “alarm over global warming may or may not be justified.”(to be continued)