Folding Forum

If a Chinese or Russian or Indian or German or British or... drug company wants to patent a drug made from that data and papers and give it away, they can.

Also, I highly suspect the US government will look VERY closely at any drug company that attempts to price-gouge for this one...

jrweiss wrote:Also, I highly suspect the US government will look VERY closely at any drug company that attempts to price-gouge for this one...

Any drug will inevitably result from a mixture of research from a wide number of labs, some of them government-funded.
While they need to make money in order to develop it, you can be sure that they will have provisions attached to the use of the information of some sort.

DarkSwordsman wrote:...So they get people to unnecessarily shorten the lifespan of their hardware...

Welcome to the F@H Forum DarkSwordsman,

If you're talking about overclocking, in theory if the lifespan of a CPU was 10 years, it might be shortened to 9 or 8 years. Realistically, will you be using an overclocked CPU that is 10 years old? Personally, I know that I will upgrade every few years when the opportunity exists so the "shortened" lifespan doesn't impact me at all. There are lots of threads if you search about CPU lifespans with overclocking where at the end of the day, running a stock CPU at 100% within it's manufacturing limits should not result in a shortened lifespan. However, running an overclocked CPU may shorten its lifespan but the users of those overclocked CPUs would upgrade way before the CPU dies due to the shortened lifespan.

Officially, F@H doesn't support overclocking thus, it can't shorten the lifespan of any hardware as long as it runs within its designed operating specifications.

So what does this mean effectively? Can somebody patent the results for which we contributed with our CPU/GPU and earn money with it? Or is it possible that a nation, probably U.S. under Trump denies other countries a possible vaccine in order to cure Americans first? Then i would stop crunching proteins right away.

hypecycle wrote:So what does this mean effectively? Can somebody patent the results for which we contributed with our CPU/GPU and earn money with it? Or is it possible that a nation, probably U.S. under Trump denies other countries a possible vaccine in order to cure Americans first? Then i would stop crunching proteins right away.

The primary results of the research cannot be patented. Companies may use those results in their further research to eventually create a product that will earn them money.

F@H results are open to researchers in all countries equally, and the government has no control over that access.

Firstly some caveats - I am not employed by or associated in an way with the FAH Consortium in any way other than as a folder and a member of this Folding Forum - the following personal views are my own from my understanding of what FAH is - if I miss-state anything it is a simple error with any malicious or devious intent

So, lets be real about this ... Any nation may choose to restrict availability of any cure/science to any other country for whatever reason it chooses (not just about Covid-19 but any cure/science) ... Not just cures/science that might have been influenced by FAH, but ones based on any scientific knowledge/breakthrough at all ... That has happened for thousands of years and still happens everywhere today ... Somehow I don't think human/societal nature is going to change - at least not for a while - but an approach such as FAH takes to put the data/papers in the public domain at least gives everyone a chance to work the science out for themselves and create their own cures/medicines

Those data and papers - which aren't cures/drugs/medicines - and the knowledge they generate, along with scientific breakthroughs from many other areas are what academic/corporate researchers use to advance the science and produce new cures/medicines ... How those companies choose to protect or not their research investment will vary but anything they produce will no doubt have some protections - and it isn't just US companies - any company in the world does the same thing

I think people are getting confused over what FAH does (or maybe I am) ... For myself, Folding with FAH in an investment in increasing scientific knowledge - with various projects mostly aimed at helping to advance the science that will help find various cures - FAH is really not likely to "Find The Cure", rather it may significantly contribute to improving the scientific knowledge that will Help find a cure ... Folding with FAH isn't "buying into a cure" it is about helping those searching for a cure better understand the science in the hope they might actually find a cure/get to a cure much quicker than they could without FAH.

I agree with Neil-B we are contributing to what is open science research, extending scientific knowledge that is not owned or sold by anyone. Now if a company uses that knowledge to create something that bit is patentable but the knowledge isn't.

hypecycle wrote:So what does this mean effectively? Can somebody patent the results for which we contributed with our CPU/GPU and earn money with it? Or is it possible that a nation, probably U.S. under Trump denies other countries a possible vaccine in order to cure Americans first?...

Welcome to the F@H Forum hypecycle,

Here's my take on it... Let's assume F@H studies bricks. It will study how to make a brick, what elements are used in making a brick, the various shapes and sizes of bricks, how bricks interacts with each other (brick laying), and how not to make bricks. All that information is available to anyone who can understand what brick making/laying is. Thus, Company A can look at all the brick research and then build a skyscraper using patented designs which uses the information/knowledge of bricks. Company B can look at all the brick research done and then build a home using design plans that are in the public domain free for anyone to use for their brick project. Thus, the knowledge of building bricks will only increase and be accessible to those in the brick field as long as you have an internet connection

hypecycle wrote:Or is it possible that a nation, probably U.S. under Trump denies other countries a possible vaccine in order to cure Americans first? Then i would stop crunching proteins right away.

Any nation that manufactures vaccine doses will likely use them to treat their citizens first before exporting it. That should not come as a surprise. The instructions for making a vaccine would (or at least certainly should) be publicly available, but producing and distributing actual vaccine doses is not as easy, and nations could restrict exports of their limited supply of doses until their citizens are taken care of. That's not greedy or selfish, that's just the nature of a limited resource. If I have 10 apples and 20 people who want one, then giving an apple to one person necessarily means that someone else will go without it. There's no "fair" solution to that, really.

Frogging101 wrote:...The instructions for making a vaccine would (or at least certainly should) be publicly available, but producing and distributing actual vaccine doses is not as easy, and nations could restrict exports of their limited supply of doses until their citizens are taken care of...

That's one of the commitments by COVID Moonshot (https://covid.postera.ai/covid) where the recipe to make the antiviral is free for anyone to make it. Thus, several countries with the right chemicals and equipment can simultaneously start producing it instead of waiting on one country/company.

Any nation that manufactures vaccine doses will likely use them to treat their citizens first before exporting it. That should not come as a surprise. The instructions for making a vaccine would (or at least certainly should) be publicly available, but producing and distributing actual vaccine doses is not as easy, and nations could restrict exports of their limited supply of doses until their citizens are taken care of. That's not greedy or selfish, that's just the nature of a limited resource. If I have 10 apples and 20 people who want one, then giving an apple to one person necessarily means that someone else will go without it. There's no "fair" solution to that, really.

Fair enough, but then I will rethink my commitment as a non U.S. citizen for U.S. research labs. There is a political component, it's not just science. U.S. authorities try to get exclusive access to vaccine manufacturers all over the world. You may call that selfish. We need rules for this. The WHO tries to establish fair rules for everybody on this planet. Unfortunately the U.S. opted out.

hypecycle wrote:

Any nation that manufactures vaccine doses will likely use them to treat their citizens first before exporting it. That should not come as a surprise. The instructions for making a vaccine would (or at least certainly should) be publicly available, but producing and distributing actual vaccine doses is not as easy, and nations could restrict exports of their limited supply of doses until their citizens are taken care of. That's not greedy or selfish, that's just the nature of a limited resource. If I have 10 apples and 20 people who want one, then giving an apple to one person necessarily means that someone else will go without it. There's no "fair" solution to that, really.

Fair enough, but then I will rethink my commitment as a non U.S. citizen for U.S. research labs. There is a political component, it's not just science. U.S. authorities try to get exclusive access to vaccine manufacturers all over the world. You may call that selfish. We need rules for this. The WHO tries to establish fair rules for everybody on this planet. Unfortunately the U.S. opted out.

You understand that just someone's point of view and it probably not relevant to this enterprise. The data created here is open to anyone and in this case the vaccine research is global, even if a country such as the USA in the example given here tried to do this it would just not be possible anymore, the USA lacks the ability to produce vaccines on this scale and relies on supply chains around the world. Even if a government of a country tried to do this it would probably not be possible to do.

hypecycle wrote:Fair enough, but then I will rethink my commitment as a non U.S. citizen for U.S. research labs. There is a political component, it's not just science. U.S. authorities try to get exclusive access to vaccine manufacturers all over the world. You may call that selfish. We need rules for this. The WHO tries to establish fair rules for everybody on this planet. Unfortunately the U.S. opted out.

I suggest you take a look at who is involved, Folding@home is not just US research labs, see the list of the F@h Consortium - https://foldingathome.org/about/the-fol ... onsortium/. Active participants include labs in Hong Kong and Sweden.

F@h collaborates with others as well. Much of the current COVID-19 projects are connected with the COVID Moonshot - https://covid.postera.ai/covid. Participants for that are based in labs around the world, and sharing data between all groups.

hypecycle wrote: Fair enough, but then I will rethink my commitment as a non U.S. citizen for U.S. research labs. There is a political component, it's not just science. U.S. authorities try to get exclusive access to vaccine manufacturers all over the world. You may call that selfish. We need rules for this. The WHO tries to establish fair rules for everybody on this planet. Unfortunately the U.S. opted out.

Folding@Home is just science, though. All of the research results from Folding@Home are publicly available and non-exclusive. Design, manufacturing, and distribution of real-world treatments is a separate issue, unrelated to Folding@Home. Folding@Home just does the science, and they make the science as accessible as possible.

Yes. Folding does the science. The pharmaceutical companies develop the drugs based on it (we hope).
They can patent their unique contributions. Several companies could have several patents on their own recipes based on the same basic research.

But you had better hope that they make money from it. Otherwise, they won't do it.