Slashdot Mirror
Nobel Laureate Attacks Medical Intellectual Property
An anonymous reader writes "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.'"
People are also scared of things they don't understand. Unless you've had a toke yourself it's easy to believe the lies when you see some bum having a whitey.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
>You assume the United States is the only one with a stupid government.
Not at all. On the other hand, I presume that other nations have people who will stand up to tyranny -- USAn's are already defeated.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Maybe but the only real thing the US produces anymore is intellectual property. Without tough and intergrated copyright and IP laws, the US economy would tank. I'd like to think that the US is so interested in IP as an alternative to the creation and exportation of real materials and work output but the global market provides US companies with an advantage that the US consumers will never have again.
Our kids or our grand kids will be walking to school up hill both ways just as our grandparents did. Face the truth and prepare for it or milk it out and enjoy it while it lasts.
The story behind "The Running Man" could become a reality. I hope "Mad Max 2" does not.
And Joe Stiglitz is a brilliant man.
Maybe, but TFA sure doesn't prove it.
Here's his thesis, boiled down to a logic nutshell:
(1) Drug patents are Bad, because they allow discoverers of useful drugs (e.g. drugs against AIDS) to charge what they want, and what they want to charge exceeds the cost many sufferers (e.g. poor people living on $2/day) can pay.
(2) However, it is clearly impossible for poor people, living on $2/day, to pay enough for their drugs to convince smart young people to go into biomedical research and discover the drugs needed -- instead of, say, becoming corporate lawyers and economics professors.
(3) So...um...how about if we set up some kind of "prize fund" which will pay those smart young people to develop the drugs, which we'll then more or less give away to the billions who need them but can't afford to pay what it costs to develop them.
Ooookay. Now, where does the money to set up the prize fund come from? It can't come from the free choice of individuals, because he's just got done saying that leaving it up to the free choice of the market ends up being Evil (see point (1), above). That leaves money taken from people by force, e.g. taxes.
Note that he presents zero evidence that the amount of money you'd need to take from people in taxes to set up this magic "prize fund" is any smaller than the amount of money big pharma already takes from its customers. And why would it be? If it takes x billion per drug to recruit the necessary team of brilliant biochemists, able scientific managers, clever IT support gurus, venture capitalists, et cetera, when the money comes from drug sales, why would it be any less than x billion when the money comes from a big ol' government grant? People are just willing to work for much less when they're paid by tax money than when they're paid by income from sales? Ha ha.
So...in Professor's Stiglitz's new world, there's no obvious difference in how much money drug companies absorb. It just comes from different places. Rather than come from those who use the drugs, it comes from everybody, through their taxes. Hence all you Slashdot suckers^H^H^H^H^H^Hyoungsters will be paying higher taxes to subsidize the Viagra and Lipitor that oldsters like the good Professor and me are using. Well carry on, my good fellows. Long live the revolution! (Ever wonder why socialized medicine is highly popular among the sick and aged? No? Excellent!)