Who Owns Molecular Biology? | Hacker News Reader

Who Owns Molecular Biology?

bostonreview.net

29 pointsbootload5 comments

I continue to think patents are hilariously bad at promoting innovation. Many people try to justify them. But I wonder if in the counterfactual world where we never had patents economists are advocating for this type of government-granted monopoly.

I honestly think banishing them would make everything, including pharmaceutical research, faster and more competitive. However, I think synthetic biology and genetic engineering may be moving too fast, so perhaps the patent breaks will give us some time to build institutions that can cope. Then I again, this quote might have some truth to it:

Germ-line engineering posses ethical dilemmas of such complexity that it is imperative we create genetically-engineered supergenius babies to tackle them.

Well, patents do not stop ill intentioned people.

About the ethical dilemmas, they'll get solved when they get more formally stated (that is, when they get practical). It's not intelligence that we are lacking. Unintended side effects are much more troubling.

Sure, but ill-intentioned people don't make much progress. If patents slow progress they'll stay the power of the ill-intentioned.

It's looking like weaponized biotechnology is going to be ridiculously cheap very soon. Delaying this may be worth the opportunity cost.

Yup. Remember when that CEO that raised the price of some pill to $750? You can thank a government-granted intellectual property monopoly for that. Many people called for more regulation to prevent this kind of thing, without considering that if you allowed competition in the first place then someone would have undercut him then next day with a $0.50 pill.

The drug there was off-patent. The issue was there was so little money in selling it that it wasn't worth going through the bio-equivalence studies to sell the generic, which costs millions, as one would be immediately undercut by the incumbent.

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