Certainly, and I think you're quite right. This is an area where industry itself is moving. I work more closely with the pharmaceutical industry. Probably the best example is the work that the Structural Genomics Consortium is doing. It's based in Toronto. About a quarter of it is funded by industry. Some of the large pharmas are involved, plus the federal government, provincial government, and the Wellcome Trust.
They started a project in which they're trying to find probes, basically molecules, that will allow them to investigate genes and other things. They've asked the industry to go back into their archives. They've got these libraries of molecules that they've tested and decided not to pursue for various reasons, but they would work really well as probes. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing these. The firms are saying that they'll go through their archives and find those tools because they think it will accelerate research. That's one example. What we're seeing at the Montreal Neurological Institute is similar, in that firms are coming to the MNI because there's the open sharing of data.
In these cases, everybody is recognizing that keeping data local actually impedes research and that we need to encourage the sharing of data. Obviously, at one some point, there has to be a patent.