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by enslavedrobot 240 days ago
Fun fact: Novo Nordisk's first success was selling insulin, which was discovered in Canada and licensed by the Scientists who's discovered it for free to the danish company in exchange for a promise to use the revenues "for good purposes".

Hopefully this patent SNAFU makes up for 1% of that monumental screw job.

3 comments

Insulin is cheap everywhere in the world except the US, and it's been around since the 1920s.

The price has nothing to do with Novo Nordisk's distribution of it last century.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8597930/

> in exchange for a promise to use the revenues "for good purposes".

They still do an enormous amount of charity, though activities of the foundation are probably highly localised to Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation

There are many different kinds of insulin now, and almost nobody uses the original version, because it's tricky to get timing and dosage right.

All with their own patent situation, of course.

Insulin is so easy to make clickbait and ragebait with due to people not knowing, or willfully ignoring, that “insulin” is not one specific medicine.

Kind of crazy considering how many people have diabetes.

I should how so, considering the discovery I'm talking about happened in 1921.