How does this story reflect on whether or not patents are vital to this industry? That seems a bit like reading a story about a drowning and saying, "This makes me wonder if water is really vital to human life." And I don't see how any of this reflects on other forms of intellectual property.
If IP disputes stop you using something when society as a whole really needs it, it doesn't really matter if the existence of IP was an efficient way of motivating the creators of that thing, as it is still effectively useless.
Personal property is subject to compulsory purchase all the time for municipal infrastructure and in times of emergency is subject to state requisition without compensation.
Patent law already covers this case. TRIPS Agreement, article 31b allows "society as a whole" to use a patent without even contacting the patent holder "in the case of a national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency or in cases of public non-commercial use."
It's not really intellectual property that is the issue, it is the contract Canada signed with the company. It's really no different than if Canada contracted with a food distributor and the distributor was dragging its feet. The issue there wouldn't be food property rights, it's picking the shitty distributor.
I wish people would actually say what the issue is instead of the vague "IP" monicker. We're talking about patents. Just patents. Not trademarks. Not copyrights. Not design patents. Not regional designation. Not integrated circuit designs. Just patents.
Now that we know what we're talking about, let's have a coolheaded discussion about pharmaceutical patents and only pharmaceutical patents, without comparing them to any other irrelevant law. In particular let's question the situation of the Canadian Crown being able to hold patents.
The worse the epidemic gets the more money they stand to make, so they don't really have much incentive to start shipping the vaccine now. Especially since it sounds like they're the only vaccine with enough doses to do large scale trials.
IIRC, during one of the recent influenza pandemics Indonesia (a hot spot then) refused to supply virus samples to the CDC because they feared that they would be charged full fare for any vaccine that would be developed. Who can find fault with that?
So really: Anybody with more than two braincells to rub together. Impeding the development of a vaccine because you fear that you personally will not be able to afford it is the worst kind of stupid. The kind of stupid which leaves you feeling self-righteous but harms others.
No, just anyone with more than two but less than five brain cells, which would be enough to understand the concepts of malicious actors and game theory. The real question is whether the fear was well-founded. What does history say about it? Does US have a habit of taking free samples only to turn around and profit on them later? If it does, then it's a Dane-Geld scenario and Indonesia would be stupid to comply without trying to secure access to the vaccine for its own people. If this was the case (I haven't read anything about it), then it would be more of an US fault for halting the progress.
There is this idea that science should be a noble calling and the fruits of research should be free to the world. That creates a perverse incentive, where you can't get rich working on fundamental research, so the folks who are bright but not selfless go into advertising and entertainment and consumer products, areas where it's "ok to get rich."
My brother did physics research through college, and was published in a prestigious journal by the time he graduated. He took his Ivy-league physics degree to Wall Street, because you're never going to get rich working in a research lab. And if you decry patents, you remove one of the few ways it is possible for researchers to get rich from their work. And just drive more people away from the field.
I'm generally not a "greed is good" kind of guy. But as long as we live in a society where making a lot of money gives you every societal advantage, from better education for your kids to better healthcare, we can't avoid thinking about the incentive structures we create.
That's a great point. One of the reasons why we have people dumping billions of dollars into drug research is because there is the opportunity for huge returns.
Kill the profit motive and you'll kill (most, not all) of the innovative new drugs.
Therefore we need to heavily incentivize researchers in the public sphere (who don't necessarily have the same type of perpetual treatment motive), along with allowing the free market researchers to operate according to their own goals.
It would be irrelevant that pharma companies benefit more from perpetual treatment if public research was a more effective balance against that. If pharma doesn't pursue a cure, and a cure is conceivable, then it would behoove academics to pursue it (as the acclaim, and hopefully financial incentive they'd receive would easily motivate them). However, due to the competition for public funding, people are less likely to go down an expensive and time consuming path like that. They're much more likely to pursue incremental discoveries that lead to continued funding rather than bet the farm on a longshot.
The main problem, in my opinion, is that there simply isn't enough science funding.
For potentially lethal and widespread problems such as cancer or infectious disease, I have to disagree-- even in the most cynical of research spaces, there is a baseline of good-faith effort and desire to improve the human condition by offering a permanent fix. Additionally, whoever is able to provide a functional cure for a big name illness will ascend into the hallowed halls of science-- a fact that nobody forgets. I don't doubt that a prospective cure would cost a tremendous amount of cash to buy for yourself, but I think it'd still be a win for the pharmas. If a pharmaceutical firm was able to cure one kind of cancer with one drug, they'd be able to shutter all of their other production facilities for the myriad number of drugs which formerly targeted that cancer, amounting to a big decrease in their operating costs. Pair that with an entire market of people needing your one very expensive product, and I think it'd work out in their favor.
Unfortunately, there is another side of this coin-- mental health. I believe that currently the problem with the profit motive which you identified is actively harming further research and development of effective cures. Cynically, the biotech companies want to make money, and psychopharmaceuticals are the ultimate cash cow as things are currently. A diagnosis of depression or ADHD means that they have a life-long customer. Thus, in order to maintain these customers buying the drugs at high prices, they must re-invent their cash cow drugs with minor changes in time with the patent cycle. There is no incentive to develop a cure, specifically because the system can be gamed in a very profitable way by rolling over patents and offering bandaid solutions.
Drug research is really hard. Researchers simply don't have the freedom to say "let's not work on a cure, let's work on a treatment instead." They throw a bunch of stuff into the hopper and if it works, they go with it.
We should fund medicine like we fund defense. Lots of innovation and lots of profits. The US has no problem spending billions developing new weapons systems or finding the $10 million per day it takes to toss bombs at a fairly low-threat (historically) issue like ISIS. Put that much into dealing with Ebola and the crisis is over fairly quickly.
Pork barrel spending based on how many congressional districts the contractor can parcel out work to, irrespective of whether there is a need for the thing being purchased, or whether it cost-effectively meets the need, or whether there's even any realistic chance that the thing being purchased will ever have any practical application?
>Kill the profit motive and you'll kill (most, not all) of the innovative new drugs.
Of course not. The alternative is to make the research a public-supported effort. We can hire more scientists with the same amount of money since it isn't being lost to executives or shareholders. Second, all of their information would be open source, which would accelerate advances. Third, drugs don't have to be prioritized by what makes sense from a monetary standpoint and instead can be prioritized from a health standpoint.
Agreed. The total NIH budget is $31B. Much of which goes to basic research, not drug development.
The total spend by pharma and biotech? The best number I could find is from PhRMA (a group of the largest pharma companies, but not all of them) and they spend $49B.
Sounds to me more like an argument against leaving basic medical and pharmaceutical research up to the private sector. All of humanity benefits from this research, so all of humanity should fund it... and no subset of humanity should be permitted to monopolize it, much less be encouraged to do so.
He took his Ivy-league physics PhD to Wall Street, because you're never going to get rich working in a research lab.
Probably the right choice. I doubt he'll miss out any Nobel Prizes as a result.
Sure, maybe it belongs in the public sector. But with current estimates of $1-5B R&D per successful new drug, it's not exactly chump change. The US gov't doesn't have a couple spare hundred billion kicking around, ready to point at drug research. So that will be a long time coming...
How do you propose having all of humanity fund it? A country could pay for it with their tax dollars, but then it is only a subset of the world having their paycheck decreased in order to help the entirety of humanity.
You need a certain amount of wealth in the country to be able to fund all this research and the US probably could afford it, but since were not going to use patents, taxpayers may become upset that a large portion of their tax dollars are going to foreign aid rather than domestic aid.
Ideally, it wouldn't be a case where one country shoulders the burden. If there are any justifications at all for multinational cooperation, this would probably be an easy sell.
We already devote a massive amount of funding to foreign aid -- about $48 billion in economic and military assistance in 2012 according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid). We sent about $13 billion to Afghanistan and Pakistan alone in 2012, according to nationalpriorities.org. This is a pretty good match for private-sector pharmaceutical R&D expenditures, about $51 billion in 2013 according to one industry lobbyist (www.phrma.org).
I don't know if the 3+ billion in military aid to Israel sould really be in the same bucket as say fighting Ebola. Then again the pharmaceutical R&D numbers are also vastly inflated.
Yeah, I was just addressing the point about the American public being upset about so much money going to what could be construed as foreign aid. It already does, and nobody evidently cares.
The US private R&D spending is over $100billion. Spending $3000 per person on what would be mostly foreign aid (7bn vs 300mn people) would be controversial.
> And if you decry patents, you remove one of the few ways it is possible for researchers to get rich from their work.
I doubt that more patents make it directly easier for researchers' salaries to increase, and increase their participation in the field.
A lot of drugs these days seem to be sold as consumer products anyway, from what I see on television (“Ask your doctor if Newdrugplexastin is for you. Side effect might include death.”) Perhaps encouraging companies to redirect some of those costs to hiring better researchers could be the solution?
I think Jesus was up to something when he said that serving God and Mammon are two incompatible goals. Pursuing things like public health is desirable - it increases general wellbeing - but you can't earn money doing so. Consider the Ebola case in Dallas: black guy, likely uninsured turns up at the hospital, and they give him antibiotics and send him on his merry way, spreading the virus for two days more. It shows why the Libertarian approach of paying for public services through fees instead of taxes frankly doesn't work.
I agree that one of the main problems of science today is the brain drain from academic research to for-profit entities. If we're being honest, they both need each other; the academics need industry to produce instruments and perform speculative engineering projects, and the industry needs the academics to train fresh scientists and buy their products. A big problem is that academics are constantly reminded by the palpable superiority of their private sector brethren; the private sector people dress better (not ratty), drive better cars (not broken shitboxes), have larger apartments (not holes in the ground), flashier parties, shorter hours, and upward potential.
Here's a solution which doesn't disrupt the good aspects of the status quo: get the government and grant-giving entities to provide more money (read: 65-140k instead of 18-50k) specifically for researcher salaries.
That way, research that is created via public money is still completely open to the public and other researchers, and there isn't an incentive to leave research in order to make more money by leaving. The private sector can still try to poach academics with higher salaries, but now they'll have a harder time.
The alternative is a continuation down the current path of patent trolling and progress-halting intellectual property law. When you're blocked from making progress on an idea for many years because someone else thought of it first, there are real consequences... namely that a lot of the important fleshing-out of an initial idea isn't subjected to any kind of rigorous external criticism and refinement. It creates weird gaps where ideas that have been around for a long time are only recently free to explore, leading to realizations of potential past-applications lost.
Scientific progress is a network of nodes which moves forward through the dimensions of sophistication and time based on how many connections there are between nodes; enough blocked connections leads to big slowdowns across an entire field. For this reason, I am against intellectual property.
Other things that the private folks have: talk more openly about their code, share their code under permissive licenses, routinely encourage others to learn more and help each other, reuse other people's code to build new things, specifically encourage development practices that scale horizontally, etc.
I wouldn't mind if we decided to start funding researchers on the public dime, full-time, but they had better do a damned sight better in terms of professionalism and communication and openness.
Also, the entire journal structure needs to be burned to the fucking ground.
The journal structure is quite destructive, but I think it's clear that we're in the midst of a major internet-driven disruption and trend toward openness. Many papers are published to reputable free journals these days.
I'd like it if the non-financial aspects of the journal structure remained the same, so as to group ideas/editorial groups/communities together, preserving the unique character of each journal and allowing people producing papers to target their submissions accurately. Freeness and openness of the information contained within is a must, though-- proprietary journal information is a racket which helps nobody.
I know a few people who do fundamental drugs research. They aren't poor, but they sure as hell aren't rich and don't seem to be trying to become rich either.
Obviously, if you got rid of patents, there is a question of funding, but I don't really think the laboratories can tell where the dollars came from to keep them going, they just need enough of them to function, so presumably there are other methods that would work to keep the funding levels up.
This theory of patents as the method to fund medical research can be tested pretty simply. Let's assume an alternative universe where the market fully funds the medical research bill, and see if it succeeds.
That is $26.4 billion of tax money not going to NiH, nor would tax funded universities spend their budget on medical research. Medical research would no longer be considered tax-deductible, so fewer donation based systems.
Now let's ask how much would the current level of medical research decrease, and which areas of medical treatments would suffer the most. My guess, based on statistics that NiH published, is that research for curing life-threatening conditions (like Ebola) would grind to a halt, together with fundamental medical research. In the longer term, the lack of common research would slowly drive the collective research to a halt, basically killing the industry as it is.
If patents are carrots, government money is the base nourishment for the medical research industry. That makes carrots the optional part, not the necessary part.
I don't disagree with your point. I used to work in defense research, where there is a lot of co-mingling between government, academia, and the private sector. Lots of people starting companies based on initial work done in a research lab. What the structure lacks in tasteful ideological purity it makes up for in effectiveness.
Take a look at the german research community with the Fraunhofer Society – the researchers don't really get rich, but they have save jobs, can continue doing what they can best (researching), while the money is completely invested in new research. And overall there are almost no profits made, because the prices are actually affordable.
Well if you want to talk perverse incentives, when can a pharmaceutical company make more money on a vaccine? When the disease is restricted to a couple thousand people in Africa? Or after it's widespread in Africa and beginning to enter advanced nations?
Show me these hordes of people who do basic research who become rich because of their patents. Because obviously the population of these must be rather sizeable for this to be a real alternative to, say, Wall Street.
I suspect your argument is pointless. I suspect you are focusing on lottery winners.
John Hennessy founding MIPS is the canonical example. Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites is another. But we're not just talking famous guys like them. At the root of most Pharma M&A are mid-sized R&D companies that get bought because of their patents. And it's not just pharma either. To pick a random recent Qualcomm acquisition, take Black Sand Technologies, which has IP in the area of power amplifiers. The company's chief technologist and co-founder is http://www.austinventures.com/team/entrepreneurs/susanne-pau..., MIT PhD with 45 patents to her name.
There is a huge blind spot on HN as to how other sectors of the engineering world work. If you're in wireless, you can't found a startup that directly targets consumers. If your innovation is a better power amplifier or more efficient transmission power control mechanism, your best bet is to start a company to develop the IP, and use that to get acquired by Qualcomm or Intel. And your alternative is to work for a big corp where all the fruits of your R&D efforts will go to passive shareholders. Or I suppose to work at a government R&D lab, where some private company will swoop in and take all the money once you've done the hard work.
I said "show me the hordes". I can come up with any number of anecdotes myself. But show me the numbers that say that it is a safer bet to stay in academia or in a technical job and file patents than, say, go to Wall Street.
I know lots and lots of people who have patents. Some of them have many patents. I know exactly zero people who have gotten rich off of their patents. I know a few people who have gotten bonuses for their patents. But nothing that would even buy a decent car. And these people are anything from independent practitioners to employees at large companies whose products you use every day.
Convince me that this is more than a mere anecdotes about lottery winners.
> so the folks who are bright but not selfless go into advertising and entertainment and consumer products, areas where it's "ok to get rich."
I think the answer is to figure how to stop people from getting rich off advertising and consumer products (and wall-street speculative manipulation of financial instruments).
More realistically, the answer is to make sure that science is well-funded and scientists get great pay without tying that to adding artificial restrictions to their results.
I gave a lecture on this at the University of Washington in 2010 and it covers intellectual property as one of the four major causes for the cost of health care in the US:
http://mises.org/daily/4434
My claim was not that it was the only factor, but that it was a major factor - I list three other major factors, the first being the most important. Comparison to the EU misses the point; both the EU and the US have intellectual property laws creating monopolies over drug production. The comparison should be to the state of the world if intellectual property law was not in force. There is little evidence that this would lead to a major reduction in production, although drug companies would really like you to believe this.
I don't agree that new drug production would stay the same without patents. Why would a drug company spend $100M-$1B to make a new drug, when the next company can start selling it for $0.10 per pill?
"In particular, Boldrin and Levine devote a chapter of their book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, to the pharmaceutical industry. They argue that the actual cost of bringing drugs to market is substantially lower than the estimates produced by the pharmaceutical industry — a group with a vested interest in lobbying for strong patent protections. They also provide evidence that in many instances the existence of patents hinders research in drug production."
The issue of IP or patent bothers me a lot less than the fact that vaccine makers have legal immunity against any potential patient injuries or deaths.
As an aside - for a wonderfully complete proposal on how to align corporate and social goals when it comes to IP in healthcare, you should see the literature on 'patent buy-outs', starting with this seminal paper by Michael Kremer: http://www.nber.org/papers/w6304.
The ScienceInsider article[1] they cite does not mention intellectual property a single time. To me, this reads like baseless speculation from CBC, when there are a litany of possible reasons for the delays listed by both sides in the ScienceInsider article. Things like protocol design for how the clinical trial should be performed are not "IP" spats, but science and statistics spats. What endpoints do you use to declare a vaccine is effective? How should patients be monitored for side effects? etc.
67 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadNow that we know what we're talking about, let's have a coolheaded discussion about pharmaceutical patents and only pharmaceutical patents, without comparing them to any other irrelevant law. In particular let's question the situation of the Canadian Crown being able to hold patents.
patents has been protecting corporate profits for a very long time.
how is this any different from the old and powerful sending the young and disposable away to distant wars to suffer and die?
this stuff is baked into humanity.
Anyone who thinks that a vaccine that you pay for is better than no vaccine.
My brother did physics research through college, and was published in a prestigious journal by the time he graduated. He took his Ivy-league physics degree to Wall Street, because you're never going to get rich working in a research lab. And if you decry patents, you remove one of the few ways it is possible for researchers to get rich from their work. And just drive more people away from the field.
I'm generally not a "greed is good" kind of guy. But as long as we live in a society where making a lot of money gives you every societal advantage, from better education for your kids to better healthcare, we can't avoid thinking about the incentive structures we create.
Kill the profit motive and you'll kill (most, not all) of the innovative new drugs.
It would be irrelevant that pharma companies benefit more from perpetual treatment if public research was a more effective balance against that. If pharma doesn't pursue a cure, and a cure is conceivable, then it would behoove academics to pursue it (as the acclaim, and hopefully financial incentive they'd receive would easily motivate them). However, due to the competition for public funding, people are less likely to go down an expensive and time consuming path like that. They're much more likely to pursue incremental discoveries that lead to continued funding rather than bet the farm on a longshot.
The main problem, in my opinion, is that there simply isn't enough science funding.
Unfortunately, there is another side of this coin-- mental health. I believe that currently the problem with the profit motive which you identified is actively harming further research and development of effective cures. Cynically, the biotech companies want to make money, and psychopharmaceuticals are the ultimate cash cow as things are currently. A diagnosis of depression or ADHD means that they have a life-long customer. Thus, in order to maintain these customers buying the drugs at high prices, they must re-invent their cash cow drugs with minor changes in time with the patent cycle. There is no incentive to develop a cure, specifically because the system can be gamed in a very profitable way by rolling over patents and offering bandaid solutions.
Says something about priorities, I guess.
Pork barrel spending based on how many congressional districts the contractor can parcel out work to, irrespective of whether there is a need for the thing being purchased, or whether it cost-effectively meets the need, or whether there's even any realistic chance that the thing being purchased will ever have any practical application?
Of course not. The alternative is to make the research a public-supported effort. We can hire more scientists with the same amount of money since it isn't being lost to executives or shareholders. Second, all of their information would be open source, which would accelerate advances. Third, drugs don't have to be prioritized by what makes sense from a monetary standpoint and instead can be prioritized from a health standpoint.
The total spend by pharma and biotech? The best number I could find is from PhRMA (a group of the largest pharma companies, but not all of them) and they spend $49B.
He took his Ivy-league physics PhD to Wall Street, because you're never going to get rich working in a research lab.
Probably the right choice. I doubt he'll miss out any Nobel Prizes as a result.
You need a certain amount of wealth in the country to be able to fund all this research and the US probably could afford it, but since were not going to use patents, taxpayers may become upset that a large portion of their tax dollars are going to foreign aid rather than domestic aid.
We already devote a massive amount of funding to foreign aid -- about $48 billion in economic and military assistance in 2012 according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid). We sent about $13 billion to Afghanistan and Pakistan alone in 2012, according to nationalpriorities.org. This is a pretty good match for private-sector pharmaceutical R&D expenditures, about $51 billion in 2013 according to one industry lobbyist (www.phrma.org).
The US private R&D spending is over $100billion. Spending $3000 per person on what would be mostly foreign aid (7bn vs 300mn people) would be controversial.
I doubt that more patents make it directly easier for researchers' salaries to increase, and increase their participation in the field.
A lot of drugs these days seem to be sold as consumer products anyway, from what I see on television (“Ask your doctor if Newdrugplexastin is for you. Side effect might include death.”) Perhaps encouraging companies to redirect some of those costs to hiring better researchers could be the solution?
Here's a solution which doesn't disrupt the good aspects of the status quo: get the government and grant-giving entities to provide more money (read: 65-140k instead of 18-50k) specifically for researcher salaries.
That way, research that is created via public money is still completely open to the public and other researchers, and there isn't an incentive to leave research in order to make more money by leaving. The private sector can still try to poach academics with higher salaries, but now they'll have a harder time.
The alternative is a continuation down the current path of patent trolling and progress-halting intellectual property law. When you're blocked from making progress on an idea for many years because someone else thought of it first, there are real consequences... namely that a lot of the important fleshing-out of an initial idea isn't subjected to any kind of rigorous external criticism and refinement. It creates weird gaps where ideas that have been around for a long time are only recently free to explore, leading to realizations of potential past-applications lost.
Scientific progress is a network of nodes which moves forward through the dimensions of sophistication and time based on how many connections there are between nodes; enough blocked connections leads to big slowdowns across an entire field. For this reason, I am against intellectual property.
I wouldn't mind if we decided to start funding researchers on the public dime, full-time, but they had better do a damned sight better in terms of professionalism and communication and openness.
Also, the entire journal structure needs to be burned to the fucking ground.
I'd like it if the non-financial aspects of the journal structure remained the same, so as to group ideas/editorial groups/communities together, preserving the unique character of each journal and allowing people producing papers to target their submissions accurately. Freeness and openness of the information contained within is a must, though-- proprietary journal information is a racket which helps nobody.
Obviously, if you got rid of patents, there is a question of funding, but I don't really think the laboratories can tell where the dollars came from to keep them going, they just need enough of them to function, so presumably there are other methods that would work to keep the funding levels up.
That is $26.4 billion of tax money not going to NiH, nor would tax funded universities spend their budget on medical research. Medical research would no longer be considered tax-deductible, so fewer donation based systems.
Now let's ask how much would the current level of medical research decrease, and which areas of medical treatments would suffer the most. My guess, based on statistics that NiH published, is that research for curing life-threatening conditions (like Ebola) would grind to a halt, together with fundamental medical research. In the longer term, the lack of common research would slowly drive the collective research to a halt, basically killing the industry as it is.
If patents are carrots, government money is the base nourishment for the medical research industry. That makes carrots the optional part, not the necessary part.
I suspect your argument is pointless. I suspect you are focusing on lottery winners.
There is a huge blind spot on HN as to how other sectors of the engineering world work. If you're in wireless, you can't found a startup that directly targets consumers. If your innovation is a better power amplifier or more efficient transmission power control mechanism, your best bet is to start a company to develop the IP, and use that to get acquired by Qualcomm or Intel. And your alternative is to work for a big corp where all the fruits of your R&D efforts will go to passive shareholders. Or I suppose to work at a government R&D lab, where some private company will swoop in and take all the money once you've done the hard work.
I know lots and lots of people who have patents. Some of them have many patents. I know exactly zero people who have gotten rich off of their patents. I know a few people who have gotten bonuses for their patents. But nothing that would even buy a decent car. And these people are anything from independent practitioners to employees at large companies whose products you use every day.
Convince me that this is more than a mere anecdotes about lottery winners.
I think the answer is to figure how to stop people from getting rich off advertising and consumer products (and wall-street speculative manipulation of financial instruments).
More realistically, the answer is to make sure that science is well-funded and scientists get great pay without tying that to adding artificial restrictions to their results.
The US pay about 10-30% more for drugs than the US. If the US was paying EU prices, it would reduce the total healthcare expenditure by 1-2%?
Right now the US spends almost 50% more than other OECD countries.
I don't agree that new drug production would stay the same without patents. Why would a drug company spend $100M-$1B to make a new drug, when the next company can start selling it for $0.10 per pill?
"In particular, Boldrin and Levine devote a chapter of their book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, to the pharmaceutical industry. They argue that the actual cost of bringing drugs to market is substantially lower than the estimates produced by the pharmaceutical industry — a group with a vested interest in lobbying for strong patent protections. They also provide evidence that in many instances the existence of patents hinders research in drug production."
[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/africa/2014/09/ebola-vaccine-test...