University of Toronto biochemist Aled Edwards has been one of the leading champions of the open-source research movement in drug development. And he has some interesting numbers to back up his calls for a revolution in research.

There are, he says, 600,000 scientists around the world who are engaged in developing new drugs. And they spawn about 20 new therapies each year. That means that it now takes 30,000 lab-years to produce a single new drug at a cost of billions of dollars. The entire process is marked by secrecy and it is increasingly inefficient and wasteful.