OA research

About that Robin Weiss essay I blogged yesterday...something else interesting in it is that when he was trying to identify how far back in chicken lineages ALV (avian leukosis virus) became incorporated into the chicken genome, he went and stayed in the jungle with Orang Asli in Malaysia to take egg and blood samples from red jungle fowl (wild chickens).

I was interested to know if the chicken ERV was a recent introduction into domestic fowl, or whether it was present in the ancestor species, the red jungle fowl. In 1970, I made a field trip to Malaysia and lived with tribesmen (orang asli) in the Pahang jungle who knew how to trap these birds, in order to take blood samples and to collect eggs for cell culture.

This is one little anecdote, but it's a concrete illustration of how indigenous people's knowledge can contribute to science. No doubt if he had just gone there with a bunch of other urban-dwelling academics either from his UCL or from UM, it would have taken them months longer to find where the jungle fowl lived, develop trapping techniques, etc.

All the talk about biotechnology and bioprospecting that the government puts out is highly ironic in light of the fact that they're kicking some of these people off their ancestral lands, especially for a silly garden which is likely to be mismanaged and turn into a white elephant as usual anyway...