Reverse engineering biology

In some circumstances secret know-how may be more desirable as a form of protection than patents. For example, processes for making a product where the process caimot readily be reverse-engineered, and where there is patent protection for the product, may better be kept as know-how. Similarly, if exclusivity can be obtained by keeping secret a particular cell-line or vims or other form of biological material and the prospect of a competitor being able to make a copy of the material is veiy low, it may be better to keep this as know how. The key question to be considered is whether, as a practical matter, the know how can be kept secret employees may leave to work for competitors, or publish scientific papers which inadvertently reveal know how. 

I appreciate this opportunity to speak at the same time on the iast day of this symposium just as my close friend and mentor. Dr. Sourirajan spoke on the first day of this symposium. In concluding his talk. Dr. Sourirajan said, "The inherent potential of reverse osmosis processes and reverse osmosis membrane to contribute significantly to the health and welfare of all being and also to the progress of many fields of science, engineering, biology and medicine is far more than what one can comprehend at any time."... 

Tissue engineering, and specifically synthetic tissue biology, is a newly emerging discipline which seeks to engineer tissues and form them into complex biological assemblages (Ben-Nissan, 2(X)4). One approach in this method is to reverse-engineer... 

Csete ME, Doyle JC (2002) Reverse engineering of biological complexity. Science 295 1664-1669 De Figueiredo LF, Podhorski A, Rubio A, Kaleta C, Beasley JE, Schuster S, Planes EJ (2009) Computing the shortest elementary flux modes in genome-scale metabolic networks. Bioinformatics 25 3158-3165... 

Reverse Engineering Gene Regulatory Networks by Integrating Multi-Source Biological Data... 

Csete, M. Doyle, J. (2002). Reverse engineering of biological complexity. Science, 295, 1664-1669. 

Tomlin, C. J. Axelrod, J. D. (2005). Understanding biology by reverse engineering the control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 4219-4220. Available from http //www.eecs.berkeley.edu/ tomlin/papers/journals/... 

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