The Elephant in the Room

 

The Elephant in the Room

In a newspaper item I read, a couple of things stand in the way of laypersons being interested in news of developments in science. These people are interested only in technological innovations, like things that make typing out an SMS message without error on the screen of a smart phone easier (in which century am I? Isn’t it WhatsApp that dominates all (frivolous) and short–no more than a single–digit dozens of bytes–of communication these days?) through predictive stuff.

The writer, perhaps with his tongue in cheek (or not) compared the interests of readers in the fact of pathogens in the waters at Maha Kumbh Mela to that one could expect for the announcement from Microsoft that it is “nearing” (has been so for decades) the holy grail of a quantum computer. No one even twitches an eye brow on the latter.

The writer is silent on one of the major contributing factors for this state of affairs. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). This is the elephant in the room.

With the strait jacket of IPR on, science correspondents are wandering in no man’s land. They cannot cater to those who are, if not scientifically or technologically aware, still interested in developments in the field or to those who look only at immediate benefits to them.

Had there been no IPR (possibly came on the statute books in the fifteenth century in Italy), science writers, steeped in the field(s) could write more deeply and meaningfully and at the same time, more attractively.

So, I blame the IPR.

Raghuram Ekambaram