Thanks, and I completely agree with you. It wasn't clear from my post, but patents are obviously important, just not to protect everybody's random ideas. That

Thanks, and I completely agree with you. It wasn't clear from my post, but patents are obviously important, just not to protect everybody's random ideas. That is why it so important to make the point about the investment. In the pharmaceutical industry (and others) there is upfront cost and that should be encouraged and subsequently protected for some time. I still have some philosophical reservations about patenting facts i.e. "this gene does that"; yet I think that is not avoidable. The "Is society as a whole served" question, to me is the paramount criterion. How to establish that for a particular invention, I do not know.