My guest today on open views is Richard Jefferson, creator of the Biological Ope Source license, and founder of Cambia, a foundation based in Australia. Cambia creates tools to foster innovation and a sprit of collaboration in the life scinces.

Richard's contributions to the life sciences are quite extra-ordinary. While doing his Ph.D at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he created a gene marker to monitor system called GUS, which allowed molecular biologists to monitor what as happening when they implanted foreign genes into an organism. Prior to this
most genetic implantation involved a fair amount of guesswork. GUS is used by thousands of labs around the world, and it is probably the most widely used tool i plant molecular biology. This came about because in 1987 Richard Jefferson prepared 10000 tubes of DNA sequences for use with GUS, wrote a manual explaining how to use it with plants, and distributed the lab packs to 500 research institutions around the world. Essentially, this was the start of creating openly available, non-restrictive fundamental tools for performing biological research - the first act towards an open-source biological toolset, which ultimately developed into the Biological Open Source initiative or BiOS, and Cambia, the foundation which Richard heads.

I spoke with Richard about his work with the biological open source initiative, and how open-access and open source work in the life sciences. I spoke with Richard for almost 2 hours, but here is a digested hour-long version of our conversation.