[vasco]

Citation needed on "the researchers aren't doing it for profit". All drug companies have a bunch of them, more than wall street types running around. Most of them enrich themselves with biotech stock bets, insider trading, regulatory capture of national agencies etc. Why do you think somehow people that go into pharma research are different from people in any other industry?

Look, random example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10370755/ - explain why if they are not motivated by profit, how is it possible that the outcome of this paper happens?

If you speak to anyone in the field, their goal to get to a point where you having a patent or two giving you a passive income stream. You can't do it if you just public domain your work.

[amrocha]

Maybe my understanding is wrong, you’re telling me researchers keep the rights to patents they develop under the employment of pharmaceutical companies, and profit off of licensing? If that’s the case I was wrong.

But as for your other point, yes, researchers are different from people in other industries because of the high barrier of entry into the field through years of schooling, and the uncertainty of the work. Anyone that’s motivated primarily by money wouldn’t go into pharma research, they’d go into CS or finance straight off university.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t want money. If you can do a job you love and get rich off it that’s the dream. And there’s no reason the public sector can’t pay enough to motivate researchers.

[vasco]

> But as for your other point, yes, researchers are different from people in other industries because of the high barrier of entry into the field through years of schooling, and the uncertainty of the work. Anyone that’s motivated primarily by money wouldn’t go into pharma research, they’d go into CS or finance straight off university.

Careful with generalizations like this, you're not far from "all CS people are neckbeards" with this "all researchers are good people". My rule of thumb is "every large enough group of people is very similar to any other". This comes from the Central Limit Theorem.

Regarding you thinking researchers don't get paid from patents, here you go:

> “Recently, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com forced NIH to disclose over 22,100 royalty payments totaling nearly $134 million paid to the agency and nearly 1,700 NIH scientists,” Adam Andrzejewski, the group’s founder and CEO, wrote in a May 9 report. “These payments occurred during the most recently available period (September 2009 – September 2014).”

The article is mostly about a specific claim they made about Fauci but you can see even just at the NIH there's a lot of money being made personally by researchers or ex-researchers like this. Which is not inherently bad, but we should keep it in mind.

https://www.factcheck.org/2022/05/scicheck-some-posts-about-...

[amrocha]

Stop putting words in my mouth. Engage with my argument, not with the straw man you constructed in your head.

Ok, I’m happy about your theorem, but there’s a reason only tall people play in the NBA.

And like, are you even reading what you’re posting, or are you just googling for articles that support your position? We’re talking about private pharmaceutical companies and you’re linking an article about a public research institution.