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While resolving crucial nuts and bolts issues largely remains to be done, there is growing awareness that science can be advanced through data
sharing [1], that data collected at public expense belong in the public domain, and that the initiative to develop effective standards of scientific openness and accountability should be taken by participating
researchers.[2]
 There are important practical and scientific reasons for the different communities concerned to take a shared initiative in fostering the development of research collaboratories focusing on genetics and health.
If the shareholders in this complex undertaking neglect to do so, there is always the possibility that they will be forced to share their data under compromising
circumstances.[3] The release by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of proposed revisions of data sharing rules "allowing public access to underlying data from federally funded research through requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)" demonstrates the reality of this prospect.
While anthropologists, for instance, may see how they fit into the research picture when it comes to what they are likely to see as "their topic"-human biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity-the general marginalization of anthropology during most recent public debate and scholarly symposia on "multiculturalism" suggests that the role of anthropologists in the study of genetic diversity may not be as self-evident to investigators in other research communities (geneticists, medical researchers, etc.) as anthropologists perhaps might want to believe.
To put the case crudely, for instance, molecular geneticists may largely see anthropologists only pragmatically as "the people who know the people" they themselves want to study in far-away places; geneticists may not see, or at any rate appreciate, why making sense of genetic diversity requires sophisticated access to anthropological information and expertise.
Genetic variation in human beings is not the only basis for variation in risk among individuals for numerous medically important, even tragic, human diseases. Finding direct relationships between genetic variation and disease is not the only way to change significantly the future prevention and treatment of illness.
Most social scientists would probably agree with their colleagues in genetics that developing better understanding of "the relationship between human DNA sequence variation, phenotypic variation, and complex diseases depends critically on better
methods."[4] But how many geneticists similarly see why social scientists insist that we also need better methods of studying what they know firsthand to be the enormous complexity of "human-environment interactions"?
For most social scientists, the "environment" that people (and their genes) interact with-"what's outside" the human body, so to speak-is complex precisely because it is not only "physical" or tangible, but also social, historical, learned, and easily permuted and quickly transformed.
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Notes:
- Hoke, Franklin. 1994. "Scientists predict Internet will revolutionize research." The Scientist 8(9):1, 8-9 (http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1994/may/hoke_p1_940502.html).
- "Where appropriate and possible, grantees from all fields will develop and submit specific plans to share materials collected with NSF support." Data Sharing Policy, Division of Social, Behavioral and Economic Research, National Science Foundation
(http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sber/common/archive/htm).
- http://whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OMB/html/circulars/a110/a110.html).
- Collins, Francis S., Ari Patrinos, and others. 1998. "New Goals for the U.S. Human Genome Project: 1998-2003." Science 5389 (23 October 1998), pages 682-689.
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