An Open Government Lesson

The New York Times had a front-page article on Friday on how the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, drug and medical-imaging companies, universities and nonprofit groups worked together to try to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer's disease.

"Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease," the article noted.

Some may be tempted to call this a an affirmation of what open government can do. Well, the project started in 2003 - still in President George W. Bush's first term.

But the point is still legitimate: Sharing data can deliver some significant insights.

And there's another, less obvious but maybe more important, lesson here for feds: Sharing isn't easy and requires everyone to be a bit more than flexible. The article's money quote for me (emphasis added):

"It was unbelievable," said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer's researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately."

Proving the axiom yet again that making information sharing work isn't a technology problem, it's a cultural problem.