Earlier this week The New York Times ran a big think piece by The New Atlantis editor Ari Schulman, on whether “science is broken,” and whether NIH director Jay Bhattacharya can fix it. Incredibly, the word “patents” did not appear once. 

That is incredibly bizarre. The high prices for drugs and other innovations that patent monopolies allow companies to charge are the basis for most of the corruption we see in health science. This is the main reason that medical journals cannot trust the articles submitted accurately reflect research done by the authors. 

The point is simple and straightforward. As a result of patent monopolies, there is an enormous amount of money at stake in biomedical research, unlike research in Astronomy or English Literature. While there are always instances of academics plagiarizing the work of others, or inaccurately representing sources and data, the problems in other fields are nowhere near as large as is the case with biomedical research.  

The consequences for public health of the perverse incentives created by patent monopolies are very real. Being able to charge prices that are ten times, or even a hundred times, the free market price gives drug companies enormous incentive to misrepresent the safety and effectiveness of their drugs. We saw this most clearly with the opioid crisis, but the corruption issue arises all the time.

Patent monopolies are one way to provide incentives for developing drugs, but they are not the only way. We know that direct funding of the sort provided by NIH is also an effective way to provide incentives. We can look to increase the amount of public funding to replace the work currently supported by patent monopolies. We may also want to alter the mechanism, having more channels than just the NIH.

That would be a great topic to debate, but this sort of discussion is not possible until outlets like The New York Times can at least acknowledge the problems with patent monopolies. If a major piece like the one by Schulman does even note the issue, science is very seriously broken.