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.