Collaborative Genetics, Part 1: The Ambitious Goals of Sage Commons Congress

In a field rife with drug-addicted industries that derive billions of dollars from a single product, and stocked with researchers who scramble for government grants (sadly cut back by the recent US federal budget), the open sharing of genetic data and tools may seem a dream.

But it must be more than a dream when the Sage Commons Congress can draw 150 attendees (turning away many more) from research institutions such as the Netherlands Bioinformatica Centre and Massachusetts General Hospital, leading universities from the US and Europe, a whole roster of drug companies (Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, Lilly, Genentech), tech companies such as Microsoft and Amazon.com, foundations such as Alfred P. Sloan, and representatives from the FDA and the White House.

I felt distinctly ill at ease trying to fit into such a well-educated crowd, but was welcomed warmly and soon found myself using words such as "phenotype" and "patient stratification."

Money is not the only complicating factor when trying to share knowledge about our genes and their effect on our health. The complex relationships of information generation, and how credit is handed out for that information, make biomedical data a case study all its own.