THE pharmaceutical giants in the industrialised world are seriously hindering progressive research by refusiDgto share significant scientific data with the academics. They are jealously keeping information - garnered by their individual R&D units - to themselves in a bid to prevent the rival companies from cashing in on it. For example, Genome Therapeutics Corporation (GTC) of Waltham, Massachusetts, us, put in just six months work to chalk out the genetic blueprint of H.Pylori, a bacterium linked with the development of stomach ulcers and gastric cancer.

Researchers are eager to get the details as they are convinced that this would speed up the development drugs and vaccines. But GTC, instead of making the data public has sold it ofle Astra, a Swedish pharmaceutical company for us $22 million. It is now A Astra to decide whether to make sclea. ed data available to academics and V what terms. Said an Astra spokespersoix "We are simply protecting our comme cial investment."

Glaxo-Wellcome, the British dq firm which independently analysed the bacterm in's genome, is also It about sharing its know Ott the scientific community. no researchers are furious. "I can undc stand people trying to make money be a lot of these projects are based on knowledge, insight and goodwill com ing from the public sector," fumes Stewart Cole, head of the Pasteur Institute in Paris.