Hi

I was just wandering if ANY of my volunteered PC/CPU/Electricity (doing work for Rosetta@home) contributes in any way to a University's, Laboratory's, or other scientific institution's profits or profit making potential.

It is well known that most scientific breakthroughs or progress in medicine or pharmacology these days are PATENTED (or protected by intellectual property rights in other ways) especially when it relates to new medicines where a pharmaceutical company (after paying royalties to a third party - such as a university department/laboratory/etc) makes billions of dollars simply by applying basic science discoveries to their new branded medicines.

Can any one provide me with some information on this issue, because I performed a search through the Rosetta Forums using the term "profit" and it returned no results - has no one ever asked this question?

Does anyone know of a case where our volunteered CPU time is used for business (rather than altruistic) purposes by the Rosetta Project ?

If we are contributing to the bottom line of a company/lab/university then I think we all have the right to know about it - and to stop our contribution to such projects if we decide we are being taken advantage of.

Thank you.

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Searching the homepage for the same word answers your question. Follow the "donate" link from the homepage for specifics on the non-profit status and ways you can directly contribute financially as well.

Dr. Baker has stated numerous times on the boards that the research is made public. There are links to many papers published by BakerLab that confirm that as well.

Related threads:
Concerns: Will someone (i.e. BigPharma) make money out of my CPU time?
Unanswered quetions about rosetta@home
Solid answer needed, for who do we do this?

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Searching the homepage for the same word answers your question. Follow the "donate" link from the homepage for specifics on the non-profit status and ways you can directly contribute financially as well.

Dr. Baker has stated numerous times on the boards that the research is made public. There are links to many papers published by BakerLab that confirm that as well.

Related threads:
Concerns: Will someone (i.e. BigPharma) make money out of my CPU time?
Unanswered quetions about rosetta@home
Solid answer needed, for who do we do this?

Seems like a profit making machine to me http://depts.washington.edu/uwc4c/ and http://c4c.uwc4c.com/express_license_technologies/rosetta

From the University of Washington's Center For Commercialisation (C4C):
"As you read this, UW researchers in hundreds of labs are making extraordinary innovations. As America’s number one federally funded public research university, UW is producing innovations that have the power to change the world—from biofuel alternatives, to more effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and brain cancer, to purification technology for drinking water in the developing world. C4C is committed to getting these research outcomes into products, services, therapies, diagnostics, and cures to where they can impact millions of people.

Since 2005, Center For Commercialisation has supported the commercialization of more than 100 projects, provided comprehensive mentoring and over $4 million in grants, and helped spin out new companies. These include, Fate Therapeutics, EnerG2, MicroGREEN Polymers, and Farecast." http://depts.washington.edu/uwc4c/about-c4c/

Some Recent Case Studies from the above page link http://depts.washington.edu/uwc4c/about-c4c/success-stories/

And finally, patents applied for (in 2012) 409, granted patents that year 69 (most of these were in the field of medicine) http://depts.washington.edu/uwc4c/about-c4c/fast-facts/

Reading through the University of Washington's Center For Commercialisation website makes it hard to support that their work is non-profit. Just because information is made public doesn't make it non profit - patents are publicly accessible by anyone, but they protect the intellectual property of the institution or lab for commercial/business purposes.

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Seems like a profit making machine to me...

Are you confusing profit with income?

All organisations that exist incur costs or expenditure at one level or another (salaries, equipment, rent, tax, electricity, etc). In order to survive, each organisation requires some method of receiving new funds to cover the costs (income).

A profit is made when income exceeds expenditure.
A loss is made when expenditure exceeds income.

A non-profit organisation is one where any excess income is reinvested in the organisation (new equipment, more staff, better facilities) so expenditure rises to the same level as income and the profit is cancelled out.

No one denies that the Rosetta project has income streams, but without income the project would collapse within weeks.


Compare that to private sector research organisations and you will see that they pay out excess income (profit) to the share holders. Of course some level of profit is always reinvested in the companies if they want to survive, but their primary goal is to make profit to give to their share holders.

The license is how they control the use of the technology they have developed to insure that others do not patent and profit in the future. For example, I believe one of the terms of the license is that you must share any modifications you make to the software.

I do not see the specific mention of patents, but am guessing the figure you found was for all of the C4C, which is for the whole university. Taking a patent can also be used as a legal means of declaring a state-of-the-art technology, and thus prevent others from attempting to declare something they did not develop as novel. It does not mean you have to charge anything. It just documents a date and technology for all to see. From that point forward, others cannot file the same patent. I do not know if there are any patents on R@h. I am just pointing out that you cannot assume much from the word.

Within the university structure at UW, the C4C was the established vehicle to handle making the software available to other research organizations. Not everything they handle is intended for commercialization, just an avenue to take things out of the university.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Seems like a profit making machine to me...

Are you confusing profit with income?

No - I may not be a scientist (I did one year of science at university but found the career prospects and pay not to my liking) - but I am a financial consultant and advisor at a major bank with responsibilities which include making daily decisions involving transactions worth millions of dollars.

I specialise in investments, risk management, taxation planning, financial statement analysis, statistical analysis/inference, modelling and forecasting, in short what makes a good investment and what doesn't.

If there's one thing I have learned during my time working in the finance industry is that even a few thousand dollars is a powerful motivator for many individuals, institutions, or "charities", to make them walk a very thin line between what is legal and what isn't (and I'm not even going to touch on the ethical aspect of these transactions and business practices).

The devil is always in the detail, and to dissect the Rosetta Project in detail will take a very long time - but if one is willing to follow the long paper trail it is usually possible to get a very accurate understanding of the company/institute/charity and it's financial operations and financial position, or at the very least you can make an informed estimate of the "cost" of investing in an enterprise (commercial or one spun off by a non-profit one) - be it an investment of time (what is called the "opportunity cost") or a financial investment.

From what I have read so far, I have stopped my BOINC client from accepting any more Rosetta work units, until I get to the bottom of this money making machine that is called the University of Washington's Center for Commercialisation (C4C) http://depts.washington.edu/uwc4c/ and the patents situation.

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This is how I understand things. I may be wrong, but someone can correct me if I am.

The predicted protein structures we contribute our time to will be made freely available to the public through the public protein databases. This is the bit we do.

Turning that protein structure into an actual drug is performed by a for-profit company. The drug will be patented. The actual protein won't be. Another company can make a competing drug using the same information about the protein structure.

The commercial licensing is for the Rosetta application, not the results. The application is not free, but the results are.

The C4C seems to be what it says in the name. We don't contribute to this at all. It connects the information sitting in a database to commercial organisations who can develop it for practical use. Like curing people.

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I think there is a confusion about Rosetta and Rosetta@home (these are different things)

Rosetta is a software package. It is used by both academic people (non-profit) and by companies (for profit).

Rosetta is free for non-profit/academic use. Companies wishing to use Rosetta for profit, need to get a license. The money from this is used to fund our research.

These companies ONLY get the rosetta software they do NOT get access to BOINC/Rosetta@home (your CPU time). Rosetta@home is ONLY used for academic research. This includes public jobs submitted through Robetta (which are run on Rosetta@home):

http://robetta.bakerlab.org/submit.jsp

See the bottom of the page "Robetta is available for NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY at this time "

Since the academic side that uses Rosetta is poor and cannot afford large super computers, it relies on all you guys!

As far as C4C, etc. University of washington encourages the formation of companies using the technology developed at University of washington (including Rosetta). Once these companies form, they build their own super computers and run rosetta on them... they do NOT at any point get access to Rosetta@home project.

thanks krypton, it's heartwarming to have researchers like you shed an important view of what and how rosetta@home is used primarily today :)

i'd think that everyone has different motivations of participating in the project.
i've actually been pulling jobs from the queue a little more frequently recently after seeing that the queue is piling up in excess of 2 million jobs awaiting to be processed. it sort of show that many researchers are indeed needing this (rosetta@home - the whole community) project as a resource. hence the participants are indeed contributing to a worthwhile effort, i.e. providing resource to help researchers/scientists find the results)

actually, i do not even mind if the academic researchers for that matter *makes money* from the results or perhaps from relevant works related to the results (e.g. win patents that are owned by the researchers / univesity etc).

i'd just hope that the results would be a public contribution to science and if it actually become new medicine or methods of treating particular diseases / conditions that those would become available say at a lower costs to the general public (world wide) as a result of these collective efforts.

meanwhile it'd be great if some researchers as a result of their works with rosetta@home makes major discoveries and wins Nobel prizes or some prestigious awards for their contributions to science and credit rosetta@home as part of their works:)

rosetta commons and rosetta@home and boinc it seemed is one of the earlier and pretty established large scale community computing projects. those awards would raise public awareness to such community projects is perhaps a milestone of how (molecular) science has advanced to the present state of art - the community internet super computer :)

i very much think that these projects are still very much niche as the general public may probably not be much aware of all these things e.g. rosetta@home that's happening right out there in the Internet :)

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