Hacker News Reader

Comment by mvanvoorden | Hacker News Reader

Exactly.

I don't understand why everybody's so afraid that without patents no medicine would be made anymore. On the contrary, it would force companies to work together and share the R&D, and would prevent the current inefficiency of multiple companies inventing the same wheel, doing the same studies, just because they all want to invent this medicine first.

Even better: with all the money that would be saved from not having all the bureaucracy around patents, governments could even set up their own research facilities and share all their findings with the public, making affordable and better medicine available for all mankind.

View on HN

That's a bit of a fantasy, isn't it? Pharma companies don't re-invent the same wheel: even in cases where they're pursuing similar avenues of research, the drugs being developed share sometimes significant differences (and in many cases, even insignificant differences can later be found to be more significant than first believed). Even if companies were somehow able to collaborate without any problem, the end result would be a decrease in the number of medications brought to market. Instead of multiple therapies that doctors can use to tailor to their individual patients, they'll get one that works for the majority of cases and woe be to anyone who falls outside the bell curve. The developing crisis with antibiotic-resistant strains is a perfect example of the sort of problems that arise from such short-sightedness.

But that's a scenario based on your idea being feasible. The far more likely scenario is an even more brutal and unethical market, where companies use controlled distribution (such as with Daraprim) to prevent generics from being tested, and thus, being brought to market. Why? Because without patents, even that limited initial window for drug companies to earn back R&D costs--along with supporting the sunk R&D costs wrapped up in the larger number of drugs the fail to bring to market--exists only so long as the manufacturer is able to use whatever force is available to it it to stop generics from being produced. Far from cooperating with one another, pharmaceutical companies would have every additional incentive to stab each other in the back. Instead of skirmishes like you have now, you'd have a war to the knife.

It's easy to look at problems with the current patent system and think that they'd all magically be fixed by getting rid of them. But unintended consequences are still consequences.

Every way of dealing with something has its flaws, the point is to fix them. The patent system is flawed in its foundation, i.e. claiming a discovery for yourself and keeping this technology away from the rest of humanity.

For the rest, I wouldn't know why there wouldn't be multiple medicines. Labs would still come up with multiple compounds that have more or less the same result, and if not, research would continue for the people who fall outside the bell curve of the other medicine.

The whole difference would be that instead of competition, there is cooperation, and the aim is not to make money or profit, but to help humanity. This is not unrealistic, it's basically what we (at least in NL) learn in primary school: "Two know more than one", "Many hands make light work", etc. It's only that the schools after that tell us to forget it all and teach us how we need to compete each other and especially to keep everything for ourselves and never do anything without expecting something in return.

[quote]where companies use controlled distribution (such as with Daraprim) to prevent generics from being tested, and thus, being brought to market. [/quote]

This wouldn't happen, as the resulting medicine IS the generic.

> For the rest, I wouldn't know why there wouldn't be multiple medicines. Labs would still come up with multiple compounds that have more or less the same result, and if not, research would continue for the people who fall outside the bell curve of the other medicine.

The issue is that this process happens right now because of independent development due to competition. As soon as you unify multiple efforts into one cooperative effort, you no longer have multiple efforts that produce multiple viable drugs.

You're appealing to unify research efforts to put more wood behind fewer arrows to help people. And that's fine. It just that this has consequences, not all of which would likely be ones you want.

So, yes, the resulting medicine would BE the generic. And that's great! But there is a drawback. And these are just the consequences we can easily predict. We haven't even thought about the psychological effects of enforced monoculture yet.

That's a nice worldview, but it is predicated on the assumption that people are basically good, as suggested by Rousseau. Many of us adhere to a more gloomy philosophy as suggested by Hobbes, that people are more likely than not to be selfish assholes given the opportunity (as demonstrated by the subject of the story). From a game-theoretic point of view, you need a strategy for dealing with defectors, just as in nature plants and animals need to evolve responses to parasitism or suffer the consequences. Symbiotic/cooperative mechanisms which are mutually beneficial can emerge in nature and in markets, but it's by no means a sure thing that they will in any given instance.

It deeply concerns me that so many people fundamentally misunderstand the point of patents. The point isn't to grant ownership over tech simply for being the first to file.

Patents, as originally intended, are to encourage documenting the invention and the eventual transfer of this knowledge to the public sector. They were never intended to be abused and twisted for personal gain as they are today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com