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The original discoverer of Insulin refused to collect patents on the drug due to the vital role the drug played in saving lives. He would be ashamed of this.
@freemo That's indeed shameful.
And it's an essential, life saving drug. Huge profit motive, and the companies are getting away with it.
@design_RG I'm not sure the companies are to blame, the profit ultimately is what pays for the drug research in the first place. If they didnt have the potential to make a large profit they probably wouldnt put the risk into developing hte drugs in the first place.
Sadly I dont have an easy solution for this other than to have drug research driven more by charity and govt funding.
@freemo Insulin has been around for many years, I am assuming this product hasn't changed its composition over these 10 years? And yet the price sky rocketed.
American trade negotiators have demanded higher patent protection as part of some of their agreements negotiations. UK people are already expecting some of that when they get to the table with US after a Brexit.
There needs to be profit enough to refund big upfront costs in R&D, and especially the testing phase and approval.
Excessive profiting is non-ethical though.
@design_RG @freemo this topic has a lot to do with patents and Congress continuing to allow them. There's good info out there on what is causing a lot of these issues.
If we moderate the medical market we're evil socialist demon monsters. People are dying, but corporate profits sure aren't!
Its very complex. if we just did away with patents and did nothing else to address the problem you would quickly find new drug discoveries would become non existant. The problem is just way more complex than that. Patents just look like its a solution in much the same way that free moneyh looks like the solution to poverty. Neither really work because they fail to address the complexity of the problem
> you would quickly find new drug discoveries would become non existant
I do not believe this to be the case. The patent has long run out on WD-40, but it has only one manufacturer. (They actually add stuff to it to foil spectroscope analysis!)
Keeping the recipe for the secret sauce secret is what you probably end up with. In the food industry, at least, companies decide to patent or not strategically: for X years, you own this compound or manufacturing method, but that also means that you have to say what it is and it becomes public record, so when the patent expires, everyone else's factories are already prepared.
You are missing the point, A soft drink, or other food is not something of a nature you would want to patent, a drug is, these are apples and oranges.
A drug asa a matter of safety must give away its chemical formula whether it is patented or not, so they dont have the option of secrecy as coca-cola might (which never patented the formula). So when we talk medication patents are really the only way they have to protect Intellectual Property in the first place.
A regulation demanding drug companies must include the chemical formulae with the drugs they sell is absolutely a regulation which creates safety.
That's the argument they use.