South African court case - conclusion
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Hello,
I would like to apologise for the info-overload re. the AIDS-drugs
case in South Africa. With the speech of Pres. Mbeki yesterday, I
feel that this thread has now reached its culmination.
Given the world-wide implications of the South African court case on
the future of trade and research, I felt it was necessary to give it
an extra focus. The public is overall not much informed of the de-
tails, and I tried as an unemployed scientist who had the chance to
work on public-funded, semi-private-funded and private-funded re-
search projects to review the consequences of this court case for the
future of research.
Regardless of the verdict, this case will have the direct implication
that more basic scientific research on AIDS will be undertaken di-
rectly in poor countries on a public, partnership basis or as col-
laborative research. It will drastically affect our peer-review
mechanism for publication and also the copyright of scientific pa-
pers. I believe that cluster analyses using semantic cues will pro-
vide a necessary parallel estimation of the scientific significance
of works.
It is important that a public debate takes place. As Western media
did not give enough exposure to this issue, it was all too natural
that the debate occurs on the Internet (see http://www.tac.org.za). I
want to also highlight that by speaking up, citizens are taking
risks: for example the risk that corporations will refuse to hire
them. If we value public debate in a democracy, it may be necessary
to partly segment forums in its direct access; this may be achieved
by avoiding to index single messages of a forum to avoid intimidation
(a simple <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag suffices).
I want to thank HealthNet for providing this forum and to express my
admiration for the moderating commitment of Dr. Neuvians.
Thanks, Christian
--
Christian Labadie, MS
mailto:CLabadie@t-online.de
http://nucwww.chem.sunysb.edu/prevges/prevges.html
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