He owns a yacht. I'd be interested to hear of a single yacht owner who is a decent person. I'm not sure one exists.

Edit: Thanks for the cool examples of decent people with yachts!

Nestlé has been patenting human milk proteins for decades. To my understanding, this prevents other companies to add such molecules to baby formula, even if somehow methods to synthesize said molecules were developed.

That is a scary notion, a malevolous intent and a gross outcome.

"...he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee."

Fuck this guy

I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.

If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.

The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.

I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.

What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.

Tbf he evolutionarily developed that genome all by himself. That's how capitalism works

What even is this argument?

"Scientists who say they can't afford to do X should do X"? Does he think this makes him sound smart?

Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. Or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.

Venter is one of the many quacks who promised that he'd find the "aging gene" and switch it off. People threw a lot of money at him about twenty years ago.