Nestlé has been patenting human milk proteins for decades. To my understanding, this prevents other companies to add such molecules to baby formula, even if somehow methods to synthesize said molecules were developed.
That is a scary notion, a malevolous intent and a gross outcome.
These shouldn’t hold up. Wouldn’t the prior work of thousands of generations of mothers invalidate such a patent.
“Excuse me madam but do you have a license to use those tits? No? Didn’t think so. The content of those bazongas is Nestle property. I’m afraid I’m going to have to clamp those nipples until such time as the proper Bandonkadonk subscriptions are paid”
i got this new legal drama plot. basically there’s this patent infringer except she’s got huge boobs. i mean some serious honkers. a real set of badonkers. packin some dobonhonkeros. massive dohoonkabhankoloos. big ol’ tonhongerekoogers.
what happens next?!
lawyer shows up with even bigger bonkhonagahoogs. humongous hungolomghononoloughongous
I read this story in Barney Stinson’s voice.
Have you considered a career in avian taxonomy?
Who doesn’t like the dickcissel or the tufted tit-mouse?
As long as the tits aren’t used for commercial purposes you don’t need a license. Anyway, I doubt that in Europe you could patent any naturally occuring molecules in any kind of milk.
You can patent pretty much anything in Europe.
However, enforcing those patents is a completely different affair.
Maybe some countries’ patent offices don’t take their job serious, but in general there are loads of things you can patent. For example basically anything naturally occuring is not generally patentable, but you can patent methods for synthesising or extracting naturally occuring things.
Something doesn’t add up here since you can’t patent anything for decades.
I read that as:
For decades, Nestle has been patenting milk proteins.
They’ve been doing it for a long time, not somehow getting extra-long patents.
Seems like I messed up carrying over thoughts over language barrier.
Where was I unclear?
patents expire. so nestle shoudln’t be able to “patenting human milk proteins for decades”
Patents can be renewed, to my knowledge, and “for decades” as in “since the 90s”.
Usually, patents have a lifetime for 20 years. Maybe you get an extension for 5 years. From were do you have the info that patents can be renewed?
Patents can’t be renewed. After expiring, they become public domain.
For decades may as well be anything from 20 years up, afaik patents may live for 50 years so this seems to work fine
Maybe there is an Oxford comma? I understood what you meant
Prior work exists, source: all of history lol
Imagine Nestle executives finding a time machine and going to all of history’s most famous persons’ mothers and telling them how they can’t breastfeed their kids.
Someone should definitely write a book about that
He owns a yacht. I’d be interested to hear of a single yacht owner who is a decent person. I’m not sure one exists.
Edit: Thanks for the cool examples of decent people with yachts!
The one guy who downvoted owns a yacht
Some people live on yachts and that’s their entire home. So like a 70,000£ yacht, then like 300£ a month in slip (berth) fees, including electric and whatnot. I strongly considered it. It’s roughly the same cost but better than caravan living, IMO.
It’s a decent alternative to a landlocked home.
But yeah, millionaires with yachts are a different thing.
That’s a good use case. I’d be interested to know more about the idiosyncrasies that come with that lifestyle, like if they go out to sea when a storm is expected, or just weather it out in the harbor.
They are almost always better in their dock, specifically boats optimised as condos are terrible at sea since open ocean is not in their design brief
Perhaps they might be better up river as far as they can go
Noah seemed like a chill dude. Man liked his drink, for sure. Loved animals…
Noah would’ve been a genocide-complicit, doomsday cult prepper, similar to those who build private libertarian cities on the ocean or some planet as a climate adaptation strategy.
Noah was the original Joe Exotic, except with every single exotic pet in existence
Noah brought along mosquitos, the guy is filled with hate
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Not sure if you read your history book (the Bible), but he only brought 2 of everything. Including mosquitoes, flies, tardigrades, etc. Everything else died.
Not sure if you read your history book (the Bible), but he brought seven pairs of clean animals and birds (Gen 7:2-3).
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I was just joshing
Wasn’t he the one that banged his daughters? Idk there was a few of those types in the bible.
Lot.
And actually, to be “fair” to him, his daughters raped him.
As written it’s not strictly his fault. Even if his parenting skills clearly lack.
As written the only person who could have communicated that story is Lot himself. Coming out of the desert with only your two daughters and two babies seems like it might be good motivation to embellish
This person seems decent. Her and her S.O. live on a 50-year-old 36’ sailboat that they bought for $7000 and refit themselves.
That’s an excellent exception, and quite interesting. Thanks for the link!
My cousin did this with her wife and they are very decent.
The thing was a floating money pit though and was usually broken down and was sometimes uninhabitable because of various issues.
Then the hull got damaged in a storm when waves banged it against the dock over and over again.
Now they own a nice little house.
My ex-teamlead owns a yacht (if he didn’t sell it). The catch is that yacht is worth about $40 thousands, not $4 millions.
Also there was a person in USSR who built a yacht and circumnavigated the Earth on that, not everyone who do own a yach own that luxury slab of floating gold
That’s awfully cheap for a yacht. Did it float?
Somehow the response got lost 🤔
It did float even though it was not new and not spacious. Then again, there are sail sport yachts that may be even cheaper but can’t be used as a home or to navigate an open water.
You wouldn’t gentrify the oceans 😳
“…he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee.”
Fuck this guy
I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.
The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.
I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.
What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish.
What field are you in? In the life sciences, there’s normally a fee to publish closed-access and a higher one for open-access. My last paper was open access and costed about 3500, compared to 1500 pay walled.
no fees in closed access in organic chemistry, as far as i know. some other subfields can be different
open access can be easily two, three grands, and you better have a grant that covers this
It depends on the journal. I’ve only published in medical related journals, but some journals don’t charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.
Depends. Many journals in Evolution/Ecology are still free to publish in non-OA. It’s becoming rarer though because many journals are switching to full (paid!) open access.
I am currently trying to publish in the European Journal of Psychology (EJoP), which is Open Access only. The fee is 750€, if I’m not mistaken, and you can apply for fee reduction. I have no idea how lenient/strict they are with that, or how much effort that would be. The department is covering the costs, obviously.
My background is in theoretical biology, but I was mostly publishing in public health, physics, and computer science journals. We paid for every paper because I feel very strongly about research being made available to everyone, especially in the case of publicly funded work. I just make sure to budget for it.
I had a couple of papers in one of the PLOS journals, which afaik are fee-only pubs.
It’s been about ten years since I’ve had to worry about publishing, as o decided to sell out and join a commercial company, and they’re pretty averse to publishing. My information might be out of date.
I do think the academic publishing industry is atrocious, however, and I have always encouraged people to check on sites like arxiv, the personal web page of the lead author, and as a final attempt contacting the lead author directly. Most journals that I dealt with permit authors to upload preprints to sites like arxiv, and if you do it with your final revision the only difference would be the formatting. Of course, that doesn’t count as a publication for academic purposes, and it doesn’t get around paying fees for the journals that charge them, but it is an avenue for people to make their research more globally available for free. I’m sure you know of that, I’m just mentioning it for students looking for a copy of a paper.
This guy probably lives in his own small world. If you want to publish in PLOS as a researcher from say Turkey or Uzbekistan or any other country where the value of your money is nil, you might easily have to pay your yearly salary or half of your funding to get a single paper published.
Can’t you just post that sheet all ober the Internet?
Yes but then who is fact checking it and giving it a stamp of authenticity
That’s the issue, you don’t want your good research to be presented next to something Disgraced Former Doctor andrew wakefield published
So don’t publish in The Lancet. Got it.
Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.
The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.
There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.
Tbf he evolutionarily developed that genome all by himself. That’s how capitalism works
He also had a history of being screwed by people. The guy did a lot of good work, and arguably his attempt at patenting it was instrumental in preventing it from being patented. I don’t think that was his intention, but good came from it.
For folks that don’t know, Venter had a company, Celera, they competed with the Human Genome Project (HGP) run by the US Gov’t. They developed interesting techniques to sequence, I believe they are credited with shotgun sequencing.
How were they able to compete?? The HGP published all their work openly, Venter and co used the freely accessible data alongside their own proprietary methods to try and sequence the human genome first themselves.
If I recall correctly it was considered a tie and they both jointly published the first sequenced human genome in Science.
shotgun sequencing predates celera and the HGP, but yeah
Aw crap, my bad, appreciate the correction. I thought they applied it in a novel way or something? Anyways Venter’s business practice sucks.
yeah, from what i remember, they pioneered a form of it called double-barrel shotgun sequencing, where both ends of the sequenced DNA fragment are analyzed for overlap instead of just one.
Eyyy, coming in with a save! Thanks! I appreciate the info.
Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. Or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.
But it’s mostly a scam. The costs don’t remotely compare to the revenue. Reviewers time is not paid, and there’s a price to both publish and access. It’s all about the prestige to publish. If you contact the author directly they’ll typically gladly send you the article for free.
Not to mention that system started about four centuries ago, long before the Internet was invented. I’d assume that back then, the costs and effort of operating a journal really did justify the prices they charged.
Oh absolutely. I agree. I don’t think anyone’s disputing that something about it needs to change. Even given that things cost money to run, for profit journals that can basically act as gatekeepers means there’s also going to be excessive price gouging and profiteering and that needs to change.
The issue is partly that, over time, private entities are going to price gouge or take similar measures (see: “enshittification”) in order to keep growing as profit falls over time. That’s just how the profit motive works, it eventually optimizes everything for profit, not just what you are comfortable with having turned into a vehicle aimed solely at making money.
So yes, this and many other important things should be treated as public goods.
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What even is this argument?
“Scientists who say they can’t afford to do X should do X”? Does he think this makes him sound smart?
Sci-hub
Paywalled articles are still openly available if you politely email the researcher. While we should strive to have no barrier, if you can’t afford to publish openly those who need the research can still acquire it under the table. Having research unpublished because the researchers could not afford to pay the fee is worse than having the research published in a closed journal.
I’ve gotten a few dozen papers from closed journals that way, and I’ve never been told no.
Or use scihub
if scihub went down academia would crumble
My prof. said sci-hub is like banned and papers older than 2022 are not availiable. Is that true or thats only for some instances?
Banned from use in the uni perhaps. It’s working fine and I just pulled a paper from the 90s the other day
Nope he said its illegal and site is blocked.
I’m sorry i mean papers newer than 2022 are not availiable
Both are false
And if the author is from 1899 ?
LitCrit has a healthy backlog in those JSTOR locked away journals.
then it’s your duty to sail the high seas like it’s 1899
I’ve never considered that since I’m in cybersecurity, so the oldest paper I’ve seen that is from the late 80s. The majority is from the mid 90s onwards though, and due to the fast moving nature of the field anything that is old enough to have a dead author is likely out of date.
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Also, if you are starting your career, it’s ridiculous to ask you to pay for open access. At least in the third world, you can barely eat with your money.
Venter is one of the many quacks who promised that he’d find the “aging gene” and switch it off. People threw a lot of money at him about twenty years ago.
Haven’t we known about the aging part of genes (telomeres) for like 80 years
Hmm, I have no expertise in this field. I recently read that aging happens, because when cells replicate their DNA a gazillion times, then sometimes they introduce slight inaccuracies or mistakes, which I guess, means tons of tiny chunks of our body will have slightly different DNA from what we got born with…?
From the little I’ve just read about telomeres, it sounds like they help to prevent some of these mistakes. Is that you mean?
IIRC, telomeres are essentially the self-destruct button for DNA. They get shorter everytime DNA replicates and when they are all used up, DNA stops replicating and the cell destroys itself. The telomeres help prevent too many mutations from building up or cancer from forming.
They was some research on animals that indicates that resetting the telomeres can extend the lifespan of the animal. But, without the telomeres, cancer and mutations eventually kill the organism.
Interesting. Yeah, it sounds like the only real way to prevent aging, would be to create a clone of yourself, let that clone grow up until their body is fully developed and then organ-harvest them to replace all of your organs one-by-one, until you’ve eventually ship-of-theseus-ed yourself. Well, and repeat that process every thirty years or so.
Certainly not quite as sexy of a process as some skincare lotions promise…
You would never be able transplant the brain, and it’s still subject to the mutations and telomeres. The only way would be to transplant the personality Altered Carbon style or completely cure brain cancer.
Yeah, that’s true. Maybe you could pull off two or three cycles without hotswapping the brain, but eventually you’d have to rejuvenate yourself by just teach everything you know to one of your clones.
…which sounds an awful lot like just having children. 🙃
I wonder if it would be possible to transplant to transplant the brain in pieces over several cycles? That way the brain could eventually be replaced by dupli-babies. Memory might become problematic though.
Well, he does have a point though. #OpenAccess
Footnote: Yeah, I saw that he had done some bad faith research, but remember open access is for everyone in the world, not just free rider corporate shills.
Footnote 2: If it is not feasible to go for gold OA journals, please go for green route: publish in closed but allows authors to put it up on preprint like arXiv.
Hahaha 🙃🙁😖😭
As a person who just paid a fuckton of money to publish in open access (literally half an hour ago), that HURTS.
Open Access is good, but first we have to abolish an entire publisher industry that lays insurmountable costs - either on readers or researchers themselves. Their work is not remotely worth that money. By making it a public good, we can cut down on so much unnecessary expenses.
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