Barring lugdunin from being patented while providing no public funding would incentivise this group to withhold publication until they thought they'd found every commercially-reasonably derivation.
Its not a "choose a system" kind of deal. It never has been. It always been state funded research + investment supported by patents + university funds + non-profit funds + additional government funded incentives. The question we should ask is if this specific incentive is needed together with all the other incentives in order to create a end user product that will saves lives sometime in the future.
Now independent researchers won't want to touch lugdunin because they'll need to license the patent, however they won't know whether licensing the patent is worthwhile until they do their research. This will prevent further research, not encourage it.
Patents don't prevent compounds from being explored in research. If this is anything like other discoveries, companies will start looking at lugdunin very closely.
What is it's mechanism of action? Can the structure be optimized? What else could it be used for?
Other antibiotics have been patented and that didn't stop companies from doing the research and tweaking the structure to make it even better.
From this image of the structure (http://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/94/31/09431-notw4-Lugduni...) it looks very much like some kind of small pore. That's a total guess, of course, but a cyclic peptide with alternating chirality looks reasonable, although a little small at only 7 residues.
Maybe a company will find a new mechanism of action when they look at analogs? Maybe a less toxic version? Maybe the lead compound fails but the backups work?
It carries too high of a risk for financially-minded people (looking for a return on investment) to throw money at it.
As opposed to the risk of searching for some completely new thing that may not exist?
The exception, at least in US law, is super-super slim
That's only true in the case of commercial R&D. For non-commercial (academic) research, the funding is normally through a grant mechanism (not company supported). Academic research is almost never concerned with the licensing/patent issues aside from "can I run my experiment". It is common for academic labs to use drugs that are still "in the pipeline" for experiments.
Cool I choose heaps of public funding and patents dead forever!
So yes, this research has been paid for by the German public. However, it is common for universities to apply for patents. Revenue from patent licensing is then usually shared between the university and the researchers.
[1]: http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/mathematisch-naturwi...
This is the sort of thing that requires and international treaty.
Unfortunately many universities (and hence researchers) are under pressure to commercialise their IP, based on the assumption that such behaviour is beneficial to the economy.
1. Get a patent, find a commercial partner and investors who will give you a ton of money to develop it in the hopes of getting a return.
2. Make it public domain, remove any financial incentive to develop it, then try and convince whoever to give you hundreds of millions of dollars to develop it without any hope of financial return?
The folks I know who work in generics complain about the razor thin margins.
Worst is when American companies charge U.S. customers higher prices than overseas consumers for drugs that were developed using USA-taxpayer-funded research.
Ever seen the video with Ron Paul being asked a question with what should happen to a person who has no insurance but needs immediate medical care and the audience shouted "Let him die!". There's your answer.
Never gets old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PepQF7G-It0
For a simple example, an academic or non-profit group might get reduced cost access to research materials and software.
Also, publicly-funded research may have a mix of funding sources, including private philanthropy and for-profit companies.
I'll take researchers for $1,000, Alex.
Not a knock to drug manufacturers who are simply acting as they should under the current profit-driven system, but I think we'd be far better off if more of this existential-level stuff (like health) were government functions, or at least government sponsored and not-for-profit.
So, let's support a federation of researchers who have direct incentive for discovery. Then, let's make those discoveries public domain.
Not quite. Arguing that Space X is no better would be following a red herring and arguing that there are no similarities is too high a standard. A valid counterargument merely needs to show that they are sufficiently different in some important way.
And, my (admittedly pithy) counterargument ran exactly along those lines.
Meanwhile, the main difference between the domains had already been pointed out in my original comment, and I even provided an example of a relevant domain.
So, you've gotten it exactly backwards: the burden is on my respondent to demonstrate why SpaceX is a relevant analogy/counterargument.