Showing posts with label curtis chong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label curtis chong. Show all posts

06 May 2008

Open Source Drug Discovery

There's something utterly perverse about the way new drugs are developed. Pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions - sometimes billions - of Euros investigating vast numbers of new compounds in the hope that they might treat a particular disease. If they find one that works, they then have to test it extensively for side-effects and the rest. Moreover, most of the negative knowledge they acquire - what doesn't work - is wilfully thrown away, since it represents "competitive" information.

But how about turning things on their head? Instead of trying millions of new substances for one disease, how about experimenting with the tens of thousands of known, safe medicines in the public domain on thousands of diseases? Like this:

The Johns Hopkins Clinical Compound Screening Initiative is an open-source effort to collect and index more than 10,000 known medications and determine which of them are also effective against hundreds of low-profile, Third World killers, such as Chagas disease, cholera and leprosy. The library will function something like a Wikipedia of drug discovery, where scientists around the world can contribute to the database and even provide samples or screen drugs themselves, thereby saving millions of dollars on R&D.

This could save millions of lives. Just one problem: nobody gets obscenely rich in the process....

14 February 2007

ODF 1.1 : True Accessibility

News that version 1.1 of the ODF standard has been approved by OASIS is hardly earth-shattering, but I thought this comment in the press release was significant:

OpenDocument 1.1 supports users who have low or no vision or who suffer from cognitive impairments. The standard not only provides short alternative descriptive text for document elements such as hyperlinks, drawing objects and image map hot spots, it also offers lengthy descriptions for the same objects should additional help be needed.

"We are thrilled with the progress to date," said Curtis Chong, president of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science. "Our views have changed over time. OpenDocument is no longer a thing to be feared, as we once thought. The OASIS process exemplifies what should be done if true accessibility to both a document format and the tools to manipulate it are to be achieved."

This address issues about ODF's accessibility for some users - something raised in certain quarters when trying to de-rail ODF's adoption by Massachusetts. Cross another "problem" off the list, please.