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.'"

Comments

Re:Patented Breast Cancer Genes?

[cnettel]

It's the detection methods and the connection to breast cancer, not the nucleotide sequence itself, that's covered by the patent. Compare this with the original discovery of blood groups for transfusions, that was patentable as well. Coming up with good protocols for inducing the proper antibodies in animals (one way to do it), for example.

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.)

Re:eminent domain

[sam_handelman]

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.

Re:Patented Breast Cancer Genes?

[troll -1]

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".