That podcast is epic, made a post about it on my site JUST to get more word on it out there. Acquired always does excellent write ups -- the competition between

That podcast is epic, made a post about it on my site JUST to get more word on it out there. Acquired always does excellent write ups -- the competition between Novo and Lilly is also pretty interesting. > The patent system is what promotes R&D. Once your patents expire anyone can manufacture your drug without ever having done any of the initial work. Drug companies have a pipeline of new drugs going through the decade of studies and trials it takes to bring them to the market and the ongoing survival of the company depends on some of these being a success. This is our current system, but I'm not sure it's the only system. There could be a world where medicine moves forward without patents, but that might be a worse outcome for patients -- assuming we wanted to keep profits even across a patent & not patent system, patients or some other revenue stream would have to make up the shortfall. > Would love to see some of the people here crying about obscene profits try their hand at investing in pharma companies. Its an easy way to lose a lot/all of your money. Also, I think most reasonable people would not immediately take to investing in random pharma companies -- you'd do quite well to simply invest in the biggest companies, or an index. The charts for the index, novo and lilly are pretty decent.