Present at the Future (36 page)

But the mystery of the uncorked bottle remains. Zare echoed the age-old complaint of scientists: “As usual, more research is needed, and the observations we have made open more questions about the laws of ‘fizzics’ than they settle…. We hear that it makes a difference if you do the experiment on Dom Pérignon, and we’d love to test that out.”

“Our thirst for knowledge is still not satisfied,” he said.

This is certainly an experiment you can try at home.

LIPSTICK AND CHAMPAGNE DON’T MIX

While we’re on the topic, Zare also found that sipping champagne while wearing lipstick kills the bubbles. Refilling a glass with a lipstick stain on it will eventually cause the newly poured champagne to go flat. Lipstick contains surfactants that reduce the surface tension of the bubbles and cause them to pop. So the foamy fizz will eventually fizzle in the glass as the champagne comes in contact with the lipstick. Now if that detail isn’t a surefire party icebreaker, the drink’s on me.

AND FINALLY: FALLING BEER BUBBLES

Here’s a cute bar trick. Bet someone a glass of Guinness that bubbles sometimes go down instead of up when beer is poured into a glass. If you’re a beer drinker, especially Guinness, you’ve always suspected it. Sometimes it looks like the beer bubbles are going down instead of
up, but how could that be? Being buoyant, bubbles always rise to the surface, don’t they?

“Bubbles are lighter than beer, so they’re supposed to rise upward,” says Zare. “But countless drinkers have claimed that the bubbles actually go down the side of the glass. Could they be right, or would that defy the laws of physics?”

The quandary came to a head in 1999 in the “battle of the bubbles” after Australian researchers predicted bubbles would behave in this crazy way on the basis of computer models showing that bubbles could theoretically flow downward in a glass of Guinness. (Sometimes I think these guys have too much time on their hands.) Zare and former Stanford postdoctoral fellow Andrew J. Alexander were skeptical. Rising to the challenge, they decided to personally investigate several liters of the brew up close and personal.

“Indeed, Andy and I first disbelieved this and wondered if the people had had maybe too much Guinness to drink,” Zare recalled. “We tried our own experiments, which were fun but inconclusive. So Andy got hold of a camera that takes seven hundred fifty frames a second and recorded some rather gorgeous video clips of what was happening.”

WHAT GOES DOWN MUST COME UP

The video didn’t lie: The beer bubbles did sink to the bottom of the glass. But why?

“The answer turns out to be really very simple,” Zare explained. “It’s based on the idea of what goes up has to come down. In this case, the bubbles go up more easily in the center of the beer glass than on the sides because of drag from the walls. As they go up, they raise the beer, and the beer has to spill back, and it does. It runs down the sides of the glass, carrying the bubbles—particularly little bubbles—with it, downward. After a while it stops, but it’s really quite dramatic and it’s easy to demonstrate.”

And if Guinness is not your brew, the bubbles will do their thing
in other carbonated beverages too. “The bubbles are small enough to be pushed down by the liquid,” said Alexander, now a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “We’ve shown [that] you can do this with any liquid, really—water with a fizzing tablet in it, for example.” Message to Alka-Seltzer: Take notice.

Okay, so much for winning a bet. But who cares?

Zare, an expert on carbonation, says that the bubbles of CO
₂
in seltzer, champagne, and beer all float to the top differently. “It’s just paying attention to the world around you and trying to figure out why things happen the way they do,” Alexander added. “In that case, anyone that goes into a pub and orders a pint of Guinness is a scientist.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

OPEN-SOURCE BIOLOGY

The power of the open-source concept isn’t so much the cost, it’s the community.

—RICHARD JEFFERSON

While to many people the computer world is divided into two camps—Mac people and PC people—there is a third camp that gets less attention: the open-source folks. These people are united to create software tools and even computer systems, such as UNIX and Linux, that are free to be used by anyone. You can download them on the Internet and run them on your computer at no charge.

That idea is now beginning to spread through the world of biology. Why not create open-source tools for biologists who can’t afford to buy the name-brand tools to help in their work in genetic engineering? To help developing countries make the products they need but can’t afford to buy?

“If we’re going to solve any of the problems that are really aching for a lot of the world, that part of the world has to solve the problems
themselves,” says Dr. Richard Jefferson, chairman, chief executive officer, and chief scientist of CAMBIA, a nonprofit biotech research organization based in Canberra, Australia. Jefferson’s BIOS initiative has taken the unheard of step of taking biotechnology into the open-source community.

For example, topping the list of important techniques in genetic engineering are a set of tools, one used to insert genes into a genome and another to help figure out in which cells those inserted genes ended up. These tools help you slice and dice the genome and put in new genetic information to create a unique product. But most of those tools are controlled by a few big biotech companies. And while they might be willing to license those tools to university researchers, for instance, they’re not so open to handing those tools over for free to people actually planning to make seeds for farmers in developing countries where they can’t afford to buy new seeds each growing season.

Jefferson and CAMBIA have been able to develop alternative tools for doing some of these key genetic engineering processes, methods that they say don’t infringe on any of those patents owned by the big guys. And they’re offering to make those tools freely available, free to others to use or expand, sort of the biological equivalent of open-source software, like Linux and the others. You can use them for free. You can improve them, but you have to put them back into the public domain so other people can use them, because if you wait for others to give you the tools, you may have to wait for a long time.

“When you talked about open source being basically tools for free, the real issue is that they can be designed and built and tuned by a large community. So the power of the open-source concept isn’t so much the cost, it’s the community.”

One project Jefferson has been working on for decades involves giving the worldwide community the open-source tools and methods it needs for transferring genes into plants. It improves on the
standard, patented method of using a common bacterium to carry the new genes into the plant.

“You take a soil bacterium called Agrobacterium that naturally lives with plants, which forms, under normal conditions, a pathogenic relationship. Basically it makes galls, like tumors, on plants. That’s a normal process, been going on for millions of years. It was discovered that in that process, the bacteria are capable of transferring part of its own genome into a plant and reengineering the plant, in fact, to feed it and clothe it, as it were.”

Jefferson and his colleagues wanted to make use of this talented bacteria. They wanted to genetically engineer the bacterium, to improve it. “Basically we think we could do something that works better. The downside: Agrobacterium is naturally a pathogen. That means that it causes diseases in plants.” So since the 1980s, Jefferson and others in his field have been working to “disarm” the plant so that it no longer made tumors but still could become infected.

“We decided to try to convince or coax some very benign bacteria that naturally live in a symbiotic relationship with plants and ask them, basically by minor adjustments, if they can transfer genes into plants. And the surprising and exciting observation is that yes, they can.”

But that’s when he realized that a morass of patents stood in his way of introducing this method into the open-source community. “We realized that the patents claim all aspects of methodology, the materials, the tricks, the tunings, and it became what we call a patent thicket, with literally hundreds of patents. So it’s not so much that it’s dominated by one multinational; it’s that there are so many patents involved that very often it only takes one out of this giant Tower of Babel of patents to be denied to stop the whole thing from working.”

The open-source community bypassed the problem, freeing up the tools for improving the bacteria and providing a set of open-source tools that people could use to avoid the patent mess. “It turns
out that this has been a need that’s been very sorely felt by a lot of people in the science community and especially in the development community. There are countless excellent scientists totally committed in the developing world or, in fact, in small and medium enterprises in the U.S. and the UK and Europe, Australia, that are dying to get out there and start innovating on behalf of smaller markets instead of just the big-margin innovations.”

And what kind of innovations might we see, now that these tools have been unleashed? Jefferson says that “part of the beauty of open source is its lack of prescriptiveness from one guy like me or one person.” In other words, the sky’s the limit. Take what you need.

“If people have needs that are legitimate and they think that they’re not being served by existing technology, the power of open source is the ability to craft the technology depending on your needs and your view that you are not being served by existing technology.”

Making the tools freely available to private individuals does not mean that such folks aren’t free to profit from their innovative use of the tools. Jefferson says there needs to be a distinction between the “tools of innovation, which we feel are an absolute fundamental human right, and the fruits of innovation,” which can be proprietary. For example, let’s say that some young scientist makes use of these tools and she uses them to develop an improved rice strain “that she thinks has the cat’s meow properties and she wants to market it with her own trademark and her own plant breeder’s varieties.

“I don’t see that that in any way suppresses the ability of other people to develop other rice varieties. And that’s the real key. As long as it doesn’t suppress free and open both competition and innovation, we see no problem with that. We don’t even see a problem with Monsanto or Syngenta using our technologies and producing new strains of corn or soybean. The real issue is not suppressing other people from providing alternatives and not suppressing other
people from developing small, medium enterprise that can be so exciting to us.”

However, what is to prevent a large company from coming in and cherry-picking the best new ideas from this “creative commons” and taking out a patent on them, in effect going against the very people who developed them?

“The basic issue is that it’s not a creative commons issue. It’s a protected commons. And that protection is built into our thinking. In other words, we are not anti-intellectual property or anti-patents. We’re very much for using them wisely and much more discreetly. But in a sense, a patent license is the very stick that goes with the carrot of the technology that says, ‘Share nicely or you don’t get to be part of the community.’ And the patent licensing and the opportunity to sue for infringement has to always be maintained as part of our structure.”

But wait. Sure, the small-business person can sue a large company for patent infringement. But what chance does a small entrepreneur have against a team of high-priced lawyers? Once again, says Jefferson, the open-source software community has been down this road and has an interesting answer.

“Look at the open-source software community, or what started out as the free-software community. The license that guides the development of Linux is called the GPL, or GNU Public License. And you know what? The total amount of money made on Linux is in the billions and billions of dollars, and do you know how many times that license has been litigated? Zero. Because they have an extraordinarily bright counsel named Eben Moglen at Columbia University in New York who, whenever there’s threat of litigation, just picks up his briefcase, goes over and talks to these people, and gets them to understand how it’s in their best interest not to. That’s the beauty of this. It’s not about confrontation. It’s about awakening people to what’s in their own self-interest and getting communities going. And it’s worked for Linux. It’s worked for the literally tens of
thousands of other software programs, including the great Apache Web server, which drives most of the World Wide Web, which was developed by our colleague, Brian Behlendorf. These are innovations that are of staggering importance to the economy, and yet, by and large, the license guiding them has not been litigated. We think that we can do the same thing. You don’t have to be confrontatory to be successful.”

The same is true for the open sharing of information. An important function of the open-source community is sharing what you know—that is, once an improvement is made, that advance is placed back into public domain, where other people can use and improve on it further. But common sense says that in the business world, knowledge is power, that sharing what you know is dangerous to your business. Not so, says Jefferson. “Yochai Benkler at Yale has written a marvelous article called ‘Sharing Nicely,’ in which he looks at the economics of innovation, and it seems to be that we actually get faster and better innovation in an industry by sharing than we do by competing.”

The end product is the capability of people to tune in to their own needs. “So instead of us talking about science done for the Third World, we should rethink [it] as science done by the Third World. Every time you see a picture of someone in Africa, India, wherever else, you see a picture of a hungry person or a poor person. But what you rarely think about is that they’re a creative person, and they are. And so the issue is we have this massive untapped source of innovation, which is normal human beings that want to solve problems. And our job is not to fix the Third World. Our job is to remove the constraints to their own creativity, and that’s a huge task. It means policy, economics, not just molecular biology.”