Pirates

The Schimmel Institute for Reverse Engineering. Has a nice sound to it, doesn’t it?

Yeah, I know the name has a few negative connotations. Sounds like a school for intellectual pirates. Not to worry, we can fix that. After all, the Schimmel Institute for Reverse Engineering — or SIRE, for short — is charged with the mission of taking apart current meanings, inventions and technologies, reconstructing them to suit our needs.

SIRE will do for science what fashion designers have been doing for years.

Admire that original Donna Karan dress? Take it apart, knock it off and sell it at a fraction of the original cost.

My dream is that SIRE will do for science and technology what is already happening in literature and music. Let’s dispense with the so-called rights of authorship. Let’s download what we like, sample it, recombine it and sell it. Quick — before someone knocks us off.

If this sounds like what is already happening in science, I think you’re right.

In some respects, reverse engineering is becoming more the rule than the exception, up and down the line. Third World drug companies knock off patented medicines from big pharmaceuticals, while the big pharmaceuticals scour the world at large for "natural" compounds they can refine or synthesize.

So you have to wonder, who’s knocking off whom? The upstart drug companies who are pirating patents or the fat pharmaceuticals who are cloning Mother Nature?

It isn’t that simple, and of course lawyers specializing in intellectual property rights will be glad to explain. They’ll argue that finding, refining and taming natural things like compounds, viruses and DNA is painstaking and often fruitless work. That the cost of testing and bringing those medicines to market can be exorbitant.

And without an incentive to make some money, science would stop and medicine would suffer. Science, they say, depends on someone being able to own and profit from it.

But this argument is unconvincing to AIDS activists, to the Napster generation, to the pirates (or Robin Hoods) who are successfully loosening the grip of corporate monopolies.

So, maybe the Schimmel Institute for Reverse Engineering won’t be necessary. Because ideas of all sorts are already pulling free of the grasp of profiteers, as if creativity itself followed an inalienable law of nature.