Elizabeth Marincola, President of the Society for Science & the Public, presented an inspiring talk at TEDMED 2013. Her presentation entitled “What happens when science, money, and freedom of information collide?” explains the need to free protected scientific knowledge.
The ability to share data worldwide, whether it’s biomedical research or patient medical records, is important to the advancement of science and medicine. Marincola argues that information availability should not be segregated by factors such as money or location.
Large amounts of medical data collected from electronic medical records (EMR) in particular has a great potential to aid in medical research. However, there are privacy and security issues with making this medical data available to physicians and researchers. It will be interesting to see how sharing of EMR data, like the sharing of scientific knowledge, may change within the coming years.