10 ms·

My only hope, with regard to genetic engineering, is that the people who are actually discovering this stuff are strong enough to prevent large corps from paten

My only hope, with regard to genetic engineering, is that the people who are actually discovering this stuff are strong enough to prevent large corps from patenting all of the most important intellectual property that will empower future generations. My active imagination hypothesizes that the people who go to work every day to invent / discover this stuff go to work only with the meager hope of collecting on their 6-figure salaries to provide for their families and pay their children through higher education. Perhaps even a stint at an Ivy League school. Meanwhile empowering large multinational corporations / conglomerates with the enormous wealth of intellectual property that their grandparents would be ashamed of.

onewaystreet 11y ago
> My only hope, with regard to genetic engineering, is that the people who are actually discovering this stuff are strong enough to prevent large corps from patenting all of the most important intellectual property that will empower future generations. Why? If you ever want this technology to be accessible to the public then someone somewhere is going to have to be making money on it. Drug manufacturing isn't done by colleges or governments.
melling 11y ago
I thought patents only lasted 17 years. Having said that, would it be possible to publicly fund more open research? The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raised $100m, for example. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/08/19/scientists-are-crediting-the-ice-bucket-challenge-for-breakthroughs-in-research/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/08...
ci5er 11y ago
I don't know. In the US you get 20 years of protection from a patent from time of filing. If somebody beats you to it, you don't. This means that a lot of tech filings are going to be pre-commercial. This means that once on the market, it will need to be tested by the market. Once the market decides that it is a better/faster/cheaper tool than the competitive product/process/genome, you've got, what, 7~10 years? Maybe? So, during this window, if you over price it, it isn't better/faster/cheaper. If it is priced competively, people benefit. The only "losers" are those that have to wait 10 years to rip off your research and clone your product and undersell you. What's the problem here?
- dave_sullivan 11y ago
  Sure, so instead of messing with messy market risk, better to patent first and not commercialize. Then sue the hell out of anyone that tries (or bury whatever the idea behind the patent, because I filed the patent, so if I can't have it, fuck 'em. It's my natural right.) Then, start a fund that simply buys the patents and "defends them" because I can get investors a 15% return from legal extortion (as opposed to illegal extortion which is higher risk/higher reward and less scalable.) Those investors will make me rich and give me lots of cool inventor awards and fancy dinners, so it all looks super legit. And make sure to hire lobbyists, because they're pretty good at making sure a good thing doesn't die.
  - ci5er 11y ago
    Step 1: Be Nathan Myhrvold? The world is certainly moving more quickly than it used to, and maybe 20 years is too long for patent protection. The alternative to utilization of a patented technology is to keep doing what you have been doing. Many people certainly do. The the patent expires about 10 years (or less) from the time the technology is made available to the market. Is that a problem? Seriously - I don't know. It doesn't seem to be (to me), but maybe the timeline is too long?
    - dave_sullivan 11y ago
      Yes, it's a problem because it causes artificial distortions on the market due to the technology not being available widely. You could argue the patent gets assigned it's fair market value because it is offered to license, but monopolies do not price well. It has nothing to do with "protecting the little guy" and in fact protects no one except for non-violent gangsters. You pay them for protection, the courts pay for their protection, and technological progress slows down because engineering around patents becomes a thing. Look: if you're pro-patents, fine, just realize how the money machine works. In practice, it's about making money and maintaining the power to do so, nothing deeper than that.
      - ci5er 11y ago
chrismartin 11y ago
I can't expect the same people to both advance the state of the art, and resist the prevailing economics that incentivize corporations who stand to gain the most (through leveraging exclusive rights) to generously fund research.
astazangasta 11y ago
You basically described my life. In a best case scenario I cure cancer, and some rich people get richer charging patients their life savings for the right to stay alive. The only way out of this trap is to destroy the patents. They add nothing other than concentrating wealth and power. The research will always be done anyway; there will always be people like me.
- bpicolo 11y ago
  And yet research costs money. No way around that sadly.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    If you are implying that patents are the only way to fund research you are wrong. They are in fact one of the least efficient ways. The NIH funds more research with a paltry $30 billion than all of pharma does taking $300 billion in patent royalties each year.
    - crazypyro 11y ago
      Do you have a link to a source for this? Not that I doubt you, but that just seems really, really hard to judge without full information and there could be obvious biases...
    - refurb 11y ago
      Uh... that's not true. Total pharma spending on R&D is double that of the NIH. Also, the NIH budget is mostly focused on basic science and much of the work has nothing to do with bringing a new drug to market. Unless you have a great idea on how to replace $60B+ in annual drug development costs, the current system will stay as it is.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - astazangasta 11y ago
88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
How would that happen? Most research is funded by the federal government. Biology is too expensive and too unreliable for companies to sink the money into research themselves until the technology is at the point where it just needs to be optimized. Also, most biologists aren't making six figures.
- datashovel 11y ago
  Oh, I definitely agree. No private entity could truly compete with government funded research. That's the ideal scenario where all important medical breakthroughs are a result of government funded research.
  - dnautics 11y ago
    what? 1) A ton of contemporary research is funded through the American Cancer Society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Herceptin was essentially kicked off through the charitable contributions of the cosmetics company Revlon. 2) Polio was cured through the efforts of a nongovernmental research agency (March of Dimes) 3) For basic research: The Glyn Research Trust was an entity set up to discover the chemiosmotic effect. Few people believed Mitchell, and it is unlikely that the work would have gotten public funding. Not only is the chemiosmotic effect now uncontroversial, but Mitchell won a Nobel Prize for his work.
    - datashovel 11y ago
      I'm certainly not implying that there aren't major non-government research efforts out there. Perhaps even more effective in some cases. But simply by sheer numbers, 2016 NIH proposed budget is $31.3 billion (http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/ http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/). That's a single year. The entire endowment of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (if the numbers are up-to-date on Wikipedia) is worth ~$19 billion. According to some basic info I've found online it appears March of Dimes averages approximately $200 million per year in donations. $30+ billion is already alot, but, given the right circumstances, at the drop of a hat a future president might be so bold to ask to redirect even more of the US Federal government's ~$4 trillion annual budget toward those efforts.

onewaystreet 11y ago

> My only hope, with regard to genetic engineering, is that the people who are actually discovering this stuff are strong enough to prevent large corps from patenting all of the most important intellectual property that will empower future generations. Why? If you ever want this technology to be accessible to the public then someone somewhere is going to have to be making money on it. Drug manufacturing isn't done by colleges or governments.

melling 11y ago

I thought patents only lasted 17 years. Having said that, would it be possible to publicly fund more open research? The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raised $100m, for example. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/08/19/scientists-are-crediting-the-ice-bucket-challenge-for-breakthroughs-in-research/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/08...

ci5er 11y ago

I don't know. In the US you get 20 years of protection from a patent from time of filing. If somebody beats you to it, you don't. This means that a lot of tech filings are going to be pre-commercial. This means that once on the market, it will need to be tested by the market. Once the market decides that it is a better/faster/cheaper tool than the competitive product/process/genome, you've got, what, 7~10 years? Maybe? So, during this window, if you over price it, it isn't better/faster/cheaper. If it is priced competively, people benefit. The only "losers" are those that have to wait 10 years to rip off your research and clone your product and undersell you. What's the problem here?

dave_sullivan 11y ago
Sure, so instead of messing with messy market risk, better to patent first and not commercialize. Then sue the hell out of anyone that tries (or bury whatever the idea behind the patent, because I filed the patent, so if I can't have it, fuck 'em. It's my natural right.) Then, start a fund that simply buys the patents and "defends them" because I can get investors a 15% return from legal extortion (as opposed to illegal extortion which is higher risk/higher reward and less scalable.) Those investors will make me rich and give me lots of cool inventor awards and fancy dinners, so it all looks super legit. And make sure to hire lobbyists, because they're pretty good at making sure a good thing doesn't die.
- ci5er 11y ago
  Step 1: Be Nathan Myhrvold? The world is certainly moving more quickly than it used to, and maybe 20 years is too long for patent protection. The alternative to utilization of a patented technology is to keep doing what you have been doing. Many people certainly do. The the patent expires about 10 years (or less) from the time the technology is made available to the market. Is that a problem? Seriously - I don't know. It doesn't seem to be (to me), but maybe the timeline is too long?
  - dave_sullivan 11y ago
    Yes, it's a problem because it causes artificial distortions on the market due to the technology not being available widely. You could argue the patent gets assigned it's fair market value because it is offered to license, but monopolies do not price well. It has nothing to do with "protecting the little guy" and in fact protects no one except for non-violent gangsters. You pay them for protection, the courts pay for their protection, and technological progress slows down because engineering around patents becomes a thing. Look: if you're pro-patents, fine, just realize how the money machine works. In practice, it's about making money and maintaining the power to do so, nothing deeper than that.
    - ci5er 11y ago

chrismartin 11y ago

I can't expect the same people to both advance the state of the art, and resist the prevailing economics that incentivize corporations who stand to gain the most (through leveraging exclusive rights) to generously fund research.

astazangasta 11y ago

You basically described my life. In a best case scenario I cure cancer, and some rich people get richer charging patients their life savings for the right to stay alive. The only way out of this trap is to destroy the patents. They add nothing other than concentrating wealth and power. The research will always be done anyway; there will always be people like me.

bpicolo 11y ago
And yet research costs money. No way around that sadly.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  If you are implying that patents are the only way to fund research you are wrong. They are in fact one of the least efficient ways. The NIH funds more research with a paltry $30 billion than all of pharma does taking $300 billion in patent royalties each year.
  - crazypyro 11y ago
    Do you have a link to a source for this? Not that I doubt you, but that just seems really, really hard to judge without full information and there could be obvious biases...
  - refurb 11y ago
    Uh... that's not true. Total pharma spending on R&D is double that of the NIH. Also, the NIH budget is mostly focused on basic science and much of the work has nothing to do with bringing a new drug to market. Unless you have a great idea on how to replace $60B+ in annual drug development costs, the current system will stay as it is.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - astazangasta 11y ago

88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago

How would that happen? Most research is funded by the federal government. Biology is too expensive and too unreliable for companies to sink the money into research themselves until the technology is at the point where it just needs to be optimized. Also, most biologists aren't making six figures.

datashovel 11y ago
Oh, I definitely agree. No private entity could truly compete with government funded research. That's the ideal scenario where all important medical breakthroughs are a result of government funded research.
- dnautics 11y ago
  what? 1) A ton of contemporary research is funded through the American Cancer Society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Herceptin was essentially kicked off through the charitable contributions of the cosmetics company Revlon. 2) Polio was cured through the efforts of a nongovernmental research agency (March of Dimes) 3) For basic research: The Glyn Research Trust was an entity set up to discover the chemiosmotic effect. Few people believed Mitchell, and it is unlikely that the work would have gotten public funding. Not only is the chemiosmotic effect now uncontroversial, but Mitchell won a Nobel Prize for his work.
  - datashovel 11y ago
    I'm certainly not implying that there aren't major non-government research efforts out there. Perhaps even more effective in some cases. But simply by sheer numbers, 2016 NIH proposed budget is $31.3 billion (http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/ http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/). That's a single year. The entire endowment of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (if the numbers are up-to-date on Wikipedia) is worth ~$19 billion. According to some basic info I've found online it appears March of Dimes averages approximately $200 million per year in donations. $30+ billion is already alot, but, given the right circumstances, at the drop of a hat a future president might be so bold to ask to redirect even more of the US Federal government's ~$4 trillion annual budget toward those efforts.