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particularly when a lot of the research was achieved by charity funding and tax grants. public funded then privately profited is a disgusting outcome of our cur
by eumoria 10y ago
particularly when a lot of the research was achieved by charity funding and tax grants. public funded then privately profited is a disgusting outcome of our current research system.
- refurb 10y agoI would disagree. Securing a patent means that further investment is possible. Yes, one of the two labs discovered CRISPR. OK, now what? It's not a treatment at this point, it's just a technique. So someone has to invest a ton of money to turn the technique into a therapy for humans. And I would bet that investment will absolutely dwarf what's been spent so far.
- amelius 10y agoThis means that only one line of further development will be possible, since a patent is basically a license for a monopoly. Instead, we could grant subsidies and have multiple developments working in parallel.
- refurb 10y agoDepending on what the other uses are, the patent holder is always able to out-license the patent for specific uses. This is actually pretty common in biotech.
- tmptmp 10y agoI am no fan of patents, especially most software patents. I hate them. But in other hard sciences the story seems to be slightly different. In theory the "subsidy to multiple parallel projects" approach seems great but it isn't so in practice. How much subsidy could be given and to how many parallel projects for a given technique? There are risks involved. We don't have infinite resources to throw at multiple parallel projects working on different problems using multiple different techniques.