I enjoyed your essay also, but the solutions you offer won't work.
This radical line of thought makes our current model of capitalist-driven R&D completely unsustainable. Your assay has already come true for the pharma industry:
Take the new-drug development pipeline: A new therapeutic concept is dreamt up - a novel biological pathway is to be targeted. First, candidate protein components are identified and thousands upon thousands of small molecules which bind these proteins and may disrupt the pathway are designed, synthesized and tested in vitro. From these, a handful are tested in vivo. Fewer then make it to toxicity testing in experiments requiring large numbers of animals. Next phase I, II and III clinical trials are performed at considerable financial cost but more crucially, at tremendous cost in time (years)! Notably, there are no guarantees that the trials will be successful or that the nascent drug is safe. Finally with regulatory approval, the pharma company can start to make a profit and recoup the tremendous R&D costs detailed above.
Crucially, the cost of actual synthesis of pharmaceuticals is trivial. A 'pirate' company in an unregulated part of the world can make a very decent profit by offering a perfect duplicate of the new drug for a fraction of the developer's cost. Your arguments about brand loyalty etc don't hold - all the customer needs is to trust that the 'pirate' has a good clean room and decent chemists; the two molecules will be identical, all the hard-work has already been done. Nobody will pay 100-1000x for a drug for brand loyalty. This is an incredible 'short-circuit' on the industry.
If you extrapolate this to a world-wide free-for-all, *no* private R&D will ever be done. Why would anyone invest (waste) their money in anything other than manufacture? If your predictions come true, the only solution is that the public purse funds all R&D, and that all new knowledge becomes automatically free and open and industry concerns itself only with manufacture. It sounds bizarre and goes completely against the grain of our current culture
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I enjoyed your essay also, but the solutions you offer won't work.
This radical line of thought makes our current model of capitalist-driven R&D completely unsustainable. Your assay has already come true for the pharma industry:
Take the new-drug development pipeline: A new therapeutic concept is dreamt up - a novel biological pathway is to be targeted. First, candidate protein components are identified and thousands upon thousands of small molecules which bind these proteins and may disrupt the pathway are designed, synthesized and tested in vitro. From these, a handful are tested in vivo. Fewer then make it to toxicity testing in experiments requiring large numbers of animals. Next phase I, II and III clinical trials are performed at considerable financial cost but more crucially, at tremendous cost in time (years)! Notably, there are no guarantees that the trials will be successful or that the nascent drug is safe. Finally with regulatory approval, the pharma company can start to make a profit and recoup the tremendous R&D costs detailed above.
Crucially, the cost of actual synthesis of pharmaceuticals is trivial. A 'pirate' company in an unregulated part of the world can make a very decent profit by offering a perfect duplicate of the new drug for a fraction of the developer's cost. Your arguments about brand loyalty etc don't hold - all the customer needs is to trust that the 'pirate' has a good clean room and decent chemists; the two molecules will be identical, all the hard-work has already been done. Nobody will pay 100-1000x for a drug for brand loyalty. This is an incredible 'short-circuit' on the industry.
If you extrapolate this to a world-wide free-for-all, *no* private R&D will ever be done. Why would anyone invest (waste) their money in anything other than manufacture? If your predictions come true, the only solution is that the public purse funds all R&D, and that all new knowledge becomes automatically free and open and industry concerns itself only with manufacture. It sounds bizarre and goes completely against the grain of our current culture