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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.'"
How can you patent something that is a 'naturally' (using that term loosely) occurring genetic abnormality?
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Things haven't changed all that much since the days of theChamberlen family.
In this case, the specific sequences connected to the disease was not common knowledge beforehand. In addition, you have to come up with relevant primers to amplify the relevant sequence in a specific, yet reproducible, manner to aid detection. I don't think anyone has really tried to challenge the exact scope of the patent, as it might be possible to circumvent it by changing the method or even trying to purify and detect the protein product instead. (However, that would NOT be a trivial thing to do, much harder than the current genetic test.)
Complaints about the patent system in drug development typically founder on one sticking point. Without patents, who is going to come up with the immense sums required to bring a drug from investigational status to clinical reality? One alternative, of course, is a national drug discovery enterprise, funded by tax money. The problem with that, however, is that the funds required are immense, and the risks are high. Who is going to take the blame if the product of a billion-dollar drug discovery effort fails in Phase III trials, something that happens rather frequently to pharmaceutical companies? Not to mention the risks that such an effort would turn into another pork boondoggle, with money being expended in response to political rather than medical needs.
Stiglitz's proposal offers an intriguing compromise--a system of federally funded prizes for private development of "open source" pharmaceuticals. Moreover, it could potentially coexist with the current patent system, perhaps initially focusing on areas that are underserved by the pharmaceutical industry, such as development of new antibiotics. Of course, the prizes would have to be very large to attract private development, given that the open source requirement would greatly limit the profit potential of the drugs discovered. However, the prizes could reasonably be staged--so much for successfully passing Phase I, so much for successfully passing Phase II, etc. etc.
Oh, how I wish I could get rid of my Type II diabetes just by getting more exercise. I love to walk and often walk several miles a day, but I still have to take my pill morning and night. Part of Type II diabetes is resistance to insulin, so that even if you have what would normally be enough, you still have blood sugar trouble. I hope that someday, preferably soon, you can learn from personal experience that a treadmill isn't a cure for diabetes.
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The parent is thinking along the correct lines but is missing something very fundamental. "Intellectual property" IS NOT PROPERTY. The fourth amendment does not apply! Since a patent is merely a privelege granted by the government, the government can simply give a more restricted privelege.
That said, there's no need to take away their patents, by eminent domain or otherwise - you can force Compulsory Licensing on them. There's ample precedent for this. The present system of compulsory licensing is simply inadequate to bring, for example, AIDS cocktails into the affordable range for poor Africans, so it needs to be strengthened.
Obviously, strengthening compulsory licensing of patents would cut into the profits of the pharmaceutical companies (duh), so they're going to fight it tooth and nail; but it's the simplest most conservative solution to the underlying problem.
I, myself, think that a better solution would be to stop offering patents on drugs at all (as it is basically an immoral practice, as TFA points out) and to provide, not "prizes", but "grants" that move beyond basic biology research (presently funded by grants) and into drug discovery. Elementary math indicates that the cost savings would be huge.
The government bureaucracy might grow somewhat, although doing a good job of awarding patents (which they don't do) probably wouldn't be that much less bureaucracy than doing a good job of administering drug discovery grants - but the equally distasteful private bureaucracies that currently parasitize themselves off of government graft would atrophy - which any real libertarian (as opposed to someone who claims a libertarian ideology in order to justify their slavish support for the uber-rich) would have to support.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Maybe because Article I, section 8 of the Constitution allows Congress to grant exclusive rights to authors and inventors for their respective "writings and discoveries".
Now I know all that text is daunting but if you'd have read towards the end of the article he actually offers an alternative/supplemental way of rewarding innovation - prize funds. Whether these would attract the huge pharmaceutical firms is unknown. However, I imagine they would attract smaller independent research groups in the way the Xprize (and others) have done. If there are $200,000 prizes for getting linux to work on an xbox, i t seems only reasonable that there should be huge cash prizes for developing treatments/cures/alternative drug therapies, and certainly these things would improve the quality of life for far more people than some nerds in their mothers basements (no offense, I'm of the garage variety).