Stem Cell Patent Halts Hospital's Collection

eldavojohn writes "It's a classic case that comes up when dealing with patents. A hospital's research on the donated brains of deceased children has been in limbo for three years because of a challenge from a patent holder. The double-edged sword of patents that spurred investment into the field will also cause chilling effects on research like the case of the Children's Hospital of Orange County. They've now been forced to shift the money from the lab to lawyers in order to deal with this ongoing patent dispute over a technique that was developed to extract stem cells at the Salk Institute. Unfortunately the Salk Institute failed to patent the technology, so a company named StemCells happily had it approved. The real disheartening news is that CHOC's Dr. Philip H. Schwartz — the doctor collecting the cells — was one of the original researchers who helped developed this technique at the Salk Institute. Now he can't even use the technique he helped create. Schwartz has since been instructed not to publicly discuss the case further. Research interests are clashing with commercial interests in a classic case that causes one to wonder if patents surrounding medical techniques like this stretch too far. As for the people that donated their dead child's brain to research, those valuable stem cell cultures have been kept in storage instead of being disseminated to research labs (which desperately need them) across the country."

Comments

hilarious

[circletimessquare]

why can't people use this amazing mental ability called compare and contrast when deriving their various lofty opinions?

the usa has plenty of problems. obviously. and don't you think any of the places you list don't have problems of their own, some of them obviously quite worse? some of them quite different? some of them leaving you just as angry and baffled as the problems in the usa? some of them just as complicated and difficult to solve as those in the usa?

furthermore, if you have a problem with a policy in your home country, instead of fleeing somewhere else, you should stay and fight for what you believe in. you're a sort of ideological parasite if you desire a certain social or legal standard, but instead of actually putting in the hard work to achieve it, you run away and instead depend upon people you don't even know in a foreign country to work hard to give you the rights and freedoms you desire

if you run off to canada and spout off to a canadian about supposed canadian superiority about this or that issue, the canadian isn't going to look at you admiringly and embrace and welcome you as some sort of secret brother in arms. no, they're going to go "well that's great that you say that. so why don't you not freeload off me here, and go back home and fight for that superior understanding you share with me, so we have a nicer neighbor to our south, okay?"

it says a lot about your supposed lofty standards that you won't even fight for them. you just run away when challenged. this is not ideological superiority, this is character weakness

imagine hypothetical ideology X. guess what: nowhere, ever, on any place in the world, will ideology X exist, unless someone actually stands their ground and fights for ideology X. if instead, the mass of believers in ideology X are only about running away and fleeing at the slightest menace to their much vaunted (and empty) beliefs, then ideology X isn't a real ideology at all, just some daydream of a philosophy student with little real world experience with actual human beings

expats, whether to the usa, or from the usa, or from any country {X} to any country {Y}, to me, you're just a coward. fight for what you believe in, and fight it where you are from. the world is never going to improve if the best keep leaving their home countries

and yes, in some places, like iran, that means you are facing certain death. if you are fleeing a truly horrible regime like in iran, that will torture and kill you for defying them, then you get a pass according to me, i don't criticize you. because i know you will continue to fight: the iranian expat community continues the struggle as best they can for their home country, because fighting from afar is weak, but its better than being dead

but, the wanker in the comment above, this is the kind of person who would never stand his ground and fight against a regime like in iran. he'll shit all over the horrid west, but if he were iranian, with his character, he would flee and cower somewhere else, never fight for the rights he says are so dear to him... in word only. or he would stay in tehran and dutifully obey every edict of the theocracy in iran, because the wanker i am responding to is obviously a spineless coward with no real allegiance to any true ideology

and right now, we must contrast such a flighty wanker with real freedom fighters, dying in iranian prisons right now, because they dare defy the regime and try to express freedoms we take for granted in the west every day

such true freedom fighters, young people with real ideals and real ideology, paying for those beliefs in their own blood and death: those dying in iranian prisons right now, in prison simply for saying what they believe, these iranians understand exactly what my comment here is all about

and would have nothing but disgust for the spineless wanker i am responding to