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Comment by pacman2 | Hacker News Reader

No. Lets take the most extreme example. Medicine. Development and clinical trials cost you more than a billion. Why would I risk this? I let you develop it, I let you do the clinical trials and then just copy it. Even better. I can always sell cheaper than you since I don't have to recover investment costs.

The patents are the only incentives for the investors to accept the risk.

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> Why would I risk this?

Because you don't. Most of the medical research in the world is government sponsored (yes, including USA).

My wife has worked for a series of VC funded immunotherapy startups. No government money funding them. If there were no biotech patents it’s hard for me to see why anyone would invest hundreds of millions into these tiny companies. The money doesn’t go to salaries - it goes to equipment, supplies, and trials.

Central planners spending other people’s money cannot possibly compete with the private system.

Your example is anecdotal, while search shows that most of the medical research is gov money via universities.

Most of the primary research is NIH money handed out to university researchers. But then easily as much money is spent in human trials and that’s privately funded.

So? A tiny fraction. Of the one billion development cost, how much is early research, done in universities?

You have no idea about this industry. Or for the noob: development costs are tiny compared to costs in clinical trials.

There are some interesting compounds. Dichloroacetate for example. Not patent protected. Feel free to start your own clinical trial tomorrow. :-)

It is people risking money in order to earn huge profits that makes the system work. The government spends enormous amounts of money on basic research, much of it ineffectively IMO. Bringing cutting edge therapies to the market was, is, and always will be through the entrepreneurial system. Believing bureaucrats can accomplish the same thing is naïveté.

This is wrong. It is correct for early stage. Compared with clinical trials, early stage costs nothing.

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