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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.'"
Remember, patents expire. There is a huge catalog of freely-available drugs out there. Take them. Use them. Stop complaining that you don't have enough free stuff, because there is a wealth of free drugs and treatments. So you're 15 or 20 years behind the state of the art. So what? Most people in this world would give anything to have 1980's technology. I survived the 80's. It wasn't that bad. Really. Just leave out the hair bands and alligator shirts if you like.
Perhaps not all innovators, but for drug research there are sometimes hundreds of people involved for several years requiring salaries, facilities, equipment and other support. Doing something great for society unfortunately doesn't pay the bills for most people.