1. BLAST Genomics Data in the Public Domain Stacy Lavin IGSP Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy

2. Agenda Historical background of bioinformatics The beginnings of BLAST GenBank BLAST and IP Interviews with BLAST creators

3. Why BLAST? Journal Citation Trends of Altschul et. al. (1990) Patent Citation Trends of ( USPTO) OREF/ BLAST and Altschul

4. Background Sequence Alignment Lewis Carroll 1879 Vanity Fair –Heads --> “heal” “teal” “tail” “tell” --> tails –Single letter substitutions R.W. Hamming 1950 Bell System Tech J Ulam-Smith 1972 Ann Review of Biophysics and Biomathematics

5. Computational and Theoretical Frontiers of Biology Zuckerkandl and Pauling (1964) Molecules as Documents of Evolutionary History Dayhoff (1964) Computer Aids to Protein Sequence Comparison Sanger (1956) The Structure of Insulin Sanger and Coulson (1975) A Rapid Method for Determining Sequences in DNA….

6. “Basic Local Alignment Tool” J Mol Biol (1990) Stephen Altschul, Warren Gish, Webb Miller, Gene Myers, David Lipman Margaret O. Dayhoff David J.Lipman

7. Collaboration Lipman Director NCBI FAST 1985 Eugene Myers Arizona University Idea for rigorous algorithm Warren Gish NCBI Wrote revised code Webb Miller Penn State University Wrote first code Stephen Altschul NCBI Statistics Wrote the paper

8. GenBank 1979 – 1992: Los Alamos 1992 forward: NCBI

9. “ But it wasn ’ t necessarily going to turn out that way. ” ~Altschul, personal correspondence in July 2005

10. Patenting DNA Data Analysis Algorithms

11. Stephen Altschul Infrastructure Incentive Investment

12. Webb Miller HGP conscript Not with public funds No licensing at PSU –GALA –New analysis methods

13. BLAST: Problems for IP Speed matters Tools like BLAST aren’t usually substitutive More coveted than analysis tools are the data themselves

14. Questions?