November 13, 2014
It seems as though someone must be preventing a discussion of the patent system. The NYT Magazine has a lengthy piece on the slowdown in the development of new drugs. It focuses on one scientist’s struggles to perfect a new treatment for diabetes, a process that is likely to take well over twenty years, even in a best case scenario.
One of the issues that contributed to this delay is the fact that a single scientist held the patent on the original innovation, which meant that no other scientists could contribute to the development process. By contrast, if the research had been funded up front and the government had not granted a patent monopoly, anyone would have been able to offer their expertise to help develop a usable treatment.
This piece provides a useful example of how patent protection can impede the development of drugs compared with alternative funding mechanisms, but the issue is never once mentioned in this piece. Of course ending patent monopolies would also eliminate the incentive of drug companies to push their drugs for inappropriate purposes and to misrepresent their effectiveness and safety. But hey, if the Chinese government doesn’t want the NYT to raise these issues, its readers will never hear about them.
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