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Ontario Defies U.S. Company Over Cancer Test Patent
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Ontario and a patented cancer test. The part I found interesting was the price comparison between the patented and non-patented tests - $3000, per test, solely due to the government-granted monopoly. Wow.
"They want all the benefit of somone else's hard work without having to pay the actual price for it." is a rather silly comparison, when you consider that the price for honouring that patent might be my life.
True.
It can also be said that people are entitled to payment for their efforts. If I was considering working in the field of cancer screening, but everybody in that field wasn't getting paid because nobody honored the patents, I'd work somewhere else.
If a bunch of biotech research firms working on a cure for cancer went under because they couldn't recoup the research investments necessary to develop new products, that would also be a bad thing.
The problem with medical patents is that medicine is one of those fields where the doctors and researchers are working in the public interest. So, I would consider charging an insane patent licensing fee, just because you could, for a test to be legal but highly unethical.
Keep a close and cynical eye, I say, on the biotech boom. Biotech is the next dotcom boom.
Gentoo Sucks
Carter noted that large amounts of public money go into scientific discoveries in the form of grants for research and clinical trials.
"The patents typically taken out at the very end stage end of a long, long process that the public has already paid for," he said.
If a company gets a grant to do research, they shouldn't be able to burn the candle at both ends by getting a patent as well. Not only that, patenting genes is a silly idea anyway. All the researchers have done is determine what existing "technology" does (technology being natural genes in this case, but whatever).
If you go back a few hundred years, you'll find that people didn't know exactly how gravity worked. There was no real knowledge of inertia, energy, heat transfer, etc. What would have been the consequences if these ideas had been patented by their pioneers (and don't think that Newton wouldn't have done it, the bastard)? The discovery of these naturally-occuring concepts was no different than the discovery of a new gene today, in terms of intellectual property.
If a company comes up with a new machine to deal with gene analysis faster and more accurately, they should be able to get a patent for the technology they've invented, but handing out patents for genes? Prior art.
Last post!
Many might not ever get a product to market. If they do, chances are, though, it'll sell. I doubt there are many biotech companies looking for answers to questions no one is asking.