Nobel Laureate Attacks Medical Intellectual Property

Nobel Laureate Attacks Medical Intellectual Property

"Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was fired by the World Bank blasted drug patents in an editorial in the British Medical Journal titled 'Scrooge and intellectual property rights.' 'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.' In medicine, patents cost lives. The US patent for turmeric didn't stimulate research, and restricted access by the Indian poor who actually discovered it hundreds of years ago. 'These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded.' Billions of people, who live on $2-3 a day, could no longer afford the drugs they needed. Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research. A few scientists beat the human genome project and patented breast cancer genes; so now the cost of testing women for breast cancer is 'enormous.'"

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/12/25/233244.shtml

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/7582/1279

thanks for the links cy.

that was very brave of him.

i agree with him.

Yet another reason humanity may be headed down the toilet. We can't even take care of each other...

Makes me think about the song "Pets" by Pornos for pyros... "Will there be another race To come along and take over for us? Maybe martians could do Better than we've done ..." ... "My friend says we're like the dinosaurs Only we are doing ourselves in Much faster than they Ever did..."

We need more Nobel Prize winners... :candle:

'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.'

Not exactly a direct analogy for IP rights. Make a widget and start selling it, give your neighbor permission to make the exact same widget (based on your R&D, but of course not at their expense!).

The wait and see if your sales are negatively impacted. Remeber, they are jumpstarted since they had virtually no R&D costs.

Elimination of IP rights results in a decrease of initiative to actually make progress.

Assure someone that the product of their labor will remain their own, for at least long enough for them to profit, and suddenly they have a strong self interest in R&D and production.

If there was no chance of a reward (profits), then nobody would take the risks (R&D costs), and the knowledge (cures) would remain undiscovered and everybody would suffer.

TANSTAAFL!

You'd think curing a disease would be reward enough... :huh2:

How do you pay the bills? Researcher salaries, electricity, materials, microscopes, supercomputers, etc. all cost real money and somebody has to pay for it all BEFORE a cure is found. Good Will To Men is a fine motivator and is usually why people get into these fields, but it doesn't get the bills paid. If you only allow investors to recover their actual costs once a cure is found, how do they pay for all the failures. Each investor would be wiped out by the first failure since that money would just be gone down the drain with no chance of being recovered with another try and a possible success. And since there are a lot more failures than successes, it wouldn't be long before there was nobody left to pay for any more tries. Philanthropy is never going to be able to generate the volume of research that good old capitalism can.

Patenting a test or a process is one thing - some companies are actually patenting HUMAN GENES, and as far as I'm concerned that's ludicrous. They didn't create or design the genes - they were simply there to be discovered. Did Madame Curie patent radium? *eyeroll*

DonShock said:

How do you pay the bills? Researcher salaries, electricity, materials, microscopes, supercomputers, etc. all cost real money and somebody has to pay for it all BEFORE a cure is found. Good Will To Men is a fine motivator and is usually why people get into these fields, but it doesn't get the bills paid. If you only allow investors to recover their actual costs once a cure is found, how do they pay for all the failures. Each investor would be wiped out by the first failure since that money would just be gone down the drain with no chance of being recovered with another try and a possible success. And since there are a lot more failures than successes, it wouldn't be long before there was nobody left to pay for any more tries. Philanthropy is never going to be able to generate the volume of research that good old capitalism can.

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Well said Don.

Cliff

There is perhaps a difference between covering pharmaceutical company costs, still making a decent profit, and gouging the living snot out of the rest of the world. Nothing wrong with making a buck, but take a look at the cost of many medications versus what your plan covers after your co-pay. It can be quite shocking.

Heck, some hospitals charged $7 for Tylenol as much as 15 years ago -- that was for a single tablet. Things have not improved a lot. Most health care "providers" and drug companies are not in any real danger of going broke soon even if they continue to support programs that offer lower cost or even free prescriptions to some customers. Many patients and even some hospitals are in trouble now. The advertisements for those programs can cost more than the money used for the programs themselves.

Heck, some hospitals charged $7 for Tylenol as much as 15 years ago

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And many of them still do or worse, but if you get your doc to write down that you're allowed to do so they will encourage you to bring your own OTC drugs with you and manage them yourself.

What is a problem is not the idea of IP and patenting, but the slide we've allowed these things to take. It is perfectly reasonable to protect the investment a company made in researching and developing a drug for a certain amount of time. A reasonable amount of time. But this and the rest have slid. Adding more time and more things that qualify. The patenting of genes is a perfect example. If you have a specific test using specific methodology and custom materials then you can certainly patent that, and if someone else can come up with a way to do the same thing based on a totally different, uninfringing system then they are allowed to do so. Or at least they would have been, but not anymore.

What we need is reform of the system, not throwing the system out.

Researching medicine and developing drugs is no longer something that a single guy can do in his basement. Big labs and big bucks are required. They simply wont enter markets where they aren't protected. I want them to keep doing what they are doing, but they have bought off our politicians and it's gotten out of control.

Reform, not revolution

Biker Bear said:

Patenting a test or a process is one thing - some companies are actually patenting HUMAN GENES, and as far as I'm concerned that's ludicrous. They didn't create or design the genes - they were simply there to be discovered. Did Madame Curie patent radium? *eyeroll*

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I agree. There should be a requirement for 'significant improvement' in order to patent a discovery or invention.

If you just pick up a rock, you can't patent it. If you pick it up, put bubble eyes on it and paint a smile on it you can patent it and get rich.

The discovery of a rock = no patent
The improvement of a rock = patentable

Willow bark is an excellent example. Even if you discover a uniqe use for an unimproved natural material it ought not to be patentable, unless 'improvement' was involved.

Patenting something that is actually the real property of someone else should also not be allowed. If I own nothing else in this world, I at least own my body (and my genes).

Biker Bear said:

Patenting a test or a process is one thing - some companies are actually patenting HUMAN GENES, and as far as I'm concerned that's ludicrous. They didn't create or design the genes - they were simply there to be discovered. Did Madame Curie patent radium?

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Yes, that's the entire point here. Patenting a drug or process which cost a lot of money to develop is one thing. The company is entitled to a monopoly for a period of time to recoup the costs. Patenting a gene or flower or some homeopathic remedy which has existed for years is quite another. It's just plain wrong (and greedy I might add).

I even heard recently of some laws pending in Congress to make many dietary supplements, including vitamins, prescription only. The goal of course is to make them more expensive and less available. A side goal is to steer people towards stronger prescription drugs for some of the same ailments which are easily cured by dietary supplements. The reason is obvious-profit. The prescription drugs will cost more, and eventually the person will develop side effects requiring yet more drugs to counter them. Eventually the person will require expensive hospitalization, perhaps even long-term care, due to the insidous side effects of these prescription drugs. If good health was the only goal dietary and lifestyle changes would be applied first. Of course, nobody makes money off healthy people so the ultimate goal of the drug industry is to have as many people as possible alive but dependent upon expensive drugs and medical procedures. It's just plain disgusting.

IMHO much more research should be devoted towards non-drug solutions to health problems. Since such solutions are by definition non or low profit then it's probably up to the public to fund such research. The real winner will be the healthier, more drug free population.

James got it; in this capitalist system the rich own the politicians and so 'rule.'
..and there's the rub, just as nuclear energy can maim and kill so can capitalism, depending on how it is used. The idea was to use capitalism for the good of people, not to make them sick. Somewhere along the way the wrong rich-powerful persons with the wrong ideas in their heads made bad, selfish, greedy choices, and here we are.

quote: "capitalist system the rich own the politicians and so 'rule.'"

Wrong.

The rich only rule via lobbying in the capitalistic system due to the redistributive justice element (socialism/communism) that the modern capitalistic system contains.

Government takes our money and resources in order to redistribute them. That gives the rich lobbiest a powerful reason to influnce government -- to get a peice of the pie.

Eliminate the governments seizure and redistribution of private property and you remove most of the reasons that the rich have to influence government.

quote: "The idea was to use capitalism for the good of people"

Wrong.

Capitalism will create good for people, but you don't use to to create that good... you simply allow it to have the effect of creating good.

Go read some Adam Smith. Capitalism is about how the self interest (the good of the one) will actually benefit more than just the one -- mutually benefitial relationships will be created based on self interested, capitalistic activity.

Self interested activity does not equate to selfish/greedy activity. In fact, within a free capitilistic system the effects of excessive greed can be mitigated by open competition.

Plus, the capitalistic system doesn't give participants the right to abandon morals, so excessive usery and the like is wrong (of course, definitions are the hard part... but it's wrong in principle even if it's hard to agree on what constitutes the practice).

The bottom line is, leave us alone to make money and you'll have a better world. The courts, and society, need to recognize frivolous patents and reject them.

BTW, the original article is a little misleading. The Tumeric patent was tossed out, not for the reasons I'd like but it was not enforcable (while the article insinuates it still stands).

Most drug companies do spend lot on promotion of a new product, it's needed since most docs get most of their information from the salespeople.
A large percentage of this however is in the form of samples and those samples are used by most to support people who can't afford the drug. For many of the 40 million or so working people who can't afford insurance, this can mean life.

sounds great in theory but it doesn't work out that way in reality does it? no it doesn't.
the "redistributive justice element" has a wonderful ring to it, too bad it doesn't exist.
no one needs or deserves to have billions of dollars, or even a billion imho, I have a problem with tens of millions too.
I don't want to get into an involved OT on this, I've posted my thoughts, or rather my cat's thoughts on economics extensively here somewhere in the cafe.. if I could only find them..

Greed is wonderful thing, it motivates, it inovates all at the expense of someone else.
Goooooo greeeed!


sarcasm intended.

Pharmaceutical companies will always recoup their R&D costs. The way it works is that when a company patents a med they get that patent for 7 seven years with a one time 1 year renewal. So for eight years they're the exclusive producers of the medicine.

After that time any pharmaceutical company capable of making the drug can do so. That's what Generics are. That's why you never see generics immediately after a drugs introduction.

Take Prilosec:
AstraZeneca forumalates omeprazole and introduce it as Prilosec which they have on the market for 8 years. At the end of that 8 year period they they reformulate the molecular binder and by doing so come up with a new molecular compound that they name esomeprazole which is introduced as Nexium. Being a new compound it gets patented. Along with the patent comes another exclusive 8 year window.

Omeprazole doesn't go by the wayside either. AstraZeneca markets it as Prilosec OTC.

Now here's the kicker. With most insurance plans it actually about the same cost for a prescription for the new drug as it would be for the over the counter version. Nexium costs me $30 for a 30 day supply. Prilosec OTC is about the same at Walgreens.

Now most companies realize that not everyone can afford prescription medications. Bristol-Meyers Squibb gives away a lot of free Plavix. Every patient that gets a coronary stent is going to be on it for at least a year. At $3 a pill a lot of people can't afford it. So the company provides it free to the health care provider as a sample to be given to the patient for free. They can then use this as a tax write off. Personally I think that since they assume the financial risk of R&D they are entitled to the rewards.

As for hospitals charges the exorbinant amounts that they do for meds, realize that some are private for-profit entities. They have stockholders to answer to and want to maximize profits at any cost. At least mine tries to.

and more than that, taking a tylenol in a hospital is not as simple as just taking a tylenol. If your doc hasn't already written a script or a note that says you can take your own, you have to ask your nurse for it. Your nurse has to search the chart or the computer to see if you're allowed to take a tylenol and what else you might be taking that might be a problem. If there are no previous orders for a tylenol then they have to ask your doc, which means paging the doc in charge of you and waiting for them to call back. When they call back they have to remind the doc who you are, refresh their memory on the chart and what else you're taking and ask about the tylenol. The doc has to figure out why you're asking for pain meds and decide if he needs to checkup further on you or if this is normal and OK and you can have the tylenol. Then the doc will give a voice order over the phone saying that it's OK for you to have the tylenol. The nurse will enter that into the computer and get the script on the way down to the pharmacy where they will verify the script and dosage and again check your chart to make sure that you're OK to have it, then dig up some tylenol and send it back up to the floor where you are. Then the nurse has to bring it to you and remember to bring you another one every 4 hours or wait for you to tell her that you need another one. Then later the doc will come by and verify that you got the meds that he prescribed and sign for real the order that he placed over the phone.

So in order for you to get a tylenol in a hospital you've used 15 minutes of a nurses time, 15 minutes of a doctors time, 5 minutes of a pharmacists time, and numerous other techs and folks to walk it around, not to mention the extra paperwork to keep scheduling it for you.

It all of a sudden doesn't sound too bad to pay that $10 for a tylenol Which is why you should ask your doc if you can bring in your OTC meds that you are going to want and get them to write ahead of time in your chart that you're allowed to take them whenever you want them.