[salawat]

Nay, sir.

Just because there exists a multi-million dollar over a lifetime treatment regime doesn't mean that it is okay to suddenly "own" an equivalent chunk of cash from everyone cured.

We invent treatments because we CAN'T find a cure. The treatment represents society's best effort to alleviate suffering.

We solve problems so that we don't have to suffer them as a society/species anymore.

Businesses exist until we figure out a way to live without them. Profit should never be the end all justification for doing something.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Just because there exists a multi-million dollar over a lifetime treatment regime doesn't mean that it is okay to suddenly "own" an equivalent chunk of cash from everyone cured.

The chunk of cash is the only reason the company is doing the research to begin with.

If finding a cure was easy then it would have been found a thousand years ago -- as some of them were. The ones remaining are hard and require a lot of resources to solve. If you want someone to put that kind of money in against a high probability of failure, they have to be able to expect an even larger amount of money to come back to them if they succeed or they won't do it.

The alternative is government funding, but then you're spending pretty much the same money. The taxpayer now has to pay the tab for all the high risk/reward research that didn't pan out. And then you're subject to all the usual government issues with bureaucracy and cronyism and principal-agent problems because you've put a thick layer of abstraction between the researchers and the patient outcomes.

[jernfrost]

Government is already developing most of the drugs to my knowlege. Univerisites research drugs with public money. Universities then work with companies to commercialise it.

As far as I know the most productive research places like xerox-parc was pretty open ended. There was not clear profit driven goals.

We also see massive success with open source projects which suggests to me that there are other ways of organizing this research which we have done very little to explore.

Not strange since there is a mssive profit incentive by industry to lobby us against ever trying alternatives.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Government is already developing most of the drugs to my knowlege. Univerisites research drugs with public money. Universities then work with companies to commercialise it.

That's a nice little scam they put together a while back. If the government funds the research then it shouldn't be patented -- the taxpayer already paid for it, they shouldn't have to pay for it a second time.

But the industry has better lobbyists than the public, so they get the taxpayer to fund the research, then wait to see if it pans out, then buy it for pennies on the dollar after they already have some evidence that it works. If it doesn't work, the taxpayer foots the bill and gets nothing. If it does work, the taxpayers have to pay even more money to use the fruits of the research they already paid for.

It's corruption plain and simple.

> We also see massive success with open source projects which suggests to me that there are other ways of organizing this research which we have done very little to explore.

Open source works, but it's mostly non-governmental.

The thing that worked really well historically was small research trials conducted by individual doctors as part of their practice and then replicated at larger scale if they panned out. That's all but impossible with the current FDA rules, somewhat for good reason (some of those experiments had a tangential relationship with ethics). But the current rules are just crushingly bureaucratic.