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That's not the right question. The right question is how many more people would have died if he had. Note that the patent system did exist and he chose not to
by noonespecial 13y ago
That's not the right question. The right question is how many more people would have died if he had.
Note that the patent system did exist and he chose not to use it, so murky questions of incentivization should that system exist or not exist needn't be raised. He just chose not to enrich himself so that more people could live. 10,000 Nathan Myhrvold's couldn't fill one of this guy's shoes.
- lucidrains 13y agoYeah, came here to say that. such a question is the perfect representation for why our healthcare is so broken.
- wavefunction 13y agoThe other aspect to consider is that his discovery for the vaccine was only possible due to the HeLa gene lines, which were taken without permission and used in a variety of 20th century discoveries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa Like many fortunes, one made on the back of a Polio vaccine would have been made with a crime, originally... I think Salk was too interested in simply eradicating polio to think of personal enrichment though.
- riggins 13y agoAm I the only one who struggles to see anything terribly wrong with what the Johns Hopkins doctors did? How much would you want to consent to a tissue sample? Me ... I'd do it for free to help science. I think most people would consent for $100 dollars and almost everyone would consent for $1000. So that puts some numbers on the 'crime'.
- Dylan16807 13y agoAt heart it's a problem of fairness, not just consent. I bet you'd agree to sell me the rights to your post for $1000. But if I went on to make twenty million dollars off your post and your total payment was $1000, that would be unfair and exploitative. Sure, you agreed, but the context changed a huge amount. In short, if you contribute in a significant way to something, you should reap some of the benefits. Even a fraction of a percent could have let her family live comfortably.
- wavefunction 13y agoI have a feeling your numbers are just nice and round and unrealistic as well. If I knew that my genes were going to result in something worth hundreds of millions of dollars for some pharma corp, I would want a lot more than $1000.
- wavefunction 13y ago-1'd for no reason other than you disagree, rather than me trolling? Pretty pathetic.
- zecho 13y agoImagine a disease in the modern world today that primarily affects young children and causes parents to bleach the streets and sidewalks. Local officials quarantine blocks of neighborhoods when someone is found with the disease, because they don't know what else to do. Now imagine someone was selling a cure at the time. There would be riots, the seller would be strung up, and his drugs/methods would be copied. I think we have great difficulty today understanding what life was like in parts of America with epidemic breaks before there was a vaccine for polio. There were children in iron lungs for weeks. I can't imagine anyone developing a vaccine or a cure for something like that and not simply giving it away. The breakthrough with polio doesn't compare to anything else in patentable medicine. Salk's work stands alone.
- noonespecial 13y agoYou don't need to imagine. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iRLtCGzuKohsD6bYlE56DvjamAhQ?docId=CNG.e375a60f2aecd194939d36a71b212ed1.91 http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iRLtCGzuK... The lives I'm thinking of weren't just Americans.
- akavi 13y ago>There were children in iron lungs for weeks. There were people in iron lungs for lifetimes