>> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. >There are many such

>> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. >There are many such examples... one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease... We were a startup so didn’t spend any effort doing a study much less a full program. It's understandable that a startup could not invest further in something they can't sell. The problem seems therefor deeper than a general invocation of 'free markets'. Perhaps the real problem is that apparently there was no way or perhaps incentive to publish the result without an expensive full study. Had the idea been published perhaps someone else would have picked it up. Would the recent fashion of preprints have helped? Or maybe the problem is that pharmaceutical business/research income depends on patents alone, and we should have some form of public investment which guaranteed profits for development of treatments regardless of patents?