Haha you should tell that to the CRISPR patent case. It’s complicated but biology esp bioinformatics is becoming insane with the patents and copyrights. There was a lawsuit to patent the BRCA gene that was shot down a few years back.

Here’s the latest on the CRISPR case if anyone wants to check it out: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00721-3

Depends. More recently we tend to cooperate, but one of the reasons why Europe had such a rapid industrialization era is because they borrowed the basics from neighboring countries.

When countries are at war, they usually give their Ally their scientific discoveries to keep up the pace. Like you said the US & USSR are great examples of these.

But then you have stuff like library of Alexandria, or really a lot of the colleges/schools built in the old world which shows for the most part we probably were exchanging knowledge for a very long time.

Knowledge is highly prized in the Middle East so it makes sense that’s where a lot of the exchanges uses to happen.

Calculus is a good example of people discovering things on their own. Newton & Leibinz technically found out about it at the same time, Leibinz just popularized it.

Results might have different methods that lead up to their discovery due to different ethical guidelines and that’s when you can argue two people discovered things at different times. It’s truly one of the reasons we have to file patents and why patent law is soooo lucrative.

Idk if this helps 😶‍🌫️

I should probably know this because it’s my field but: How do you produce a drug with low toxicity but high effectiveness like anti-psychotics or benzodiazepines? Is it trial and error?

Complicated: just because the genome has been sequenced doesn’t mean that we all have the same genes codes. It’s just to be used as a reference in order to find other mutations and have a rough idea of what the genome should look like.

One of the problems with the current model is that it fails to account for natural variation in terms of race or location. There’s a reason each country has its own program for genome sequencing, and I think England is doing it the best by randomly asking people to join rather than self report bcus that way you get a wider variety of variations.

In general, as a sidebar, The HGP also doesn’t account for the exome or other environmental factors. The variations in our genes are sometimes just base pairs but that mutation can be very significant, so having a “healthy” reference or protein can help us understand why it happens.