The people that do so would rather like to be compensated for it. You may think it's an imperfect system but until you personally start making cancer drugs for the world for free maybe you should think a little deeper on the subject.
And, I would add: talent, on average, goes where the money is. We've seen it in sports, and it's true in academic pursuits.
Plus, it takes a helluva lot of money to get these drugs to market. Nobody gives that money to a company without a fair shot of getting it back. Hence, for the time being anyway, patents are a requirement in that field.
This seems to be common wisdom in this thread, but I note an extreme lack of actually cited sources, so I decided to go dig some up.
I remember reading a book in 2004 discussing what percentage of medical industry profits went towards research and development, verses what percentage went towards marketing. While I cannot recall the title (I have read thousands of books since then), the idea did stick with me, and a bit of quick Googling produced some results:
First, and perhaps most shocking: http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e4348
Here is a copy of this research without the paywall: http://www.pharmamyths.net/files/BMJ-Innova_ARTICLE_8-11-12....
According to the pop-sci summary of this article in the HufPo, what these numbers translate to is that Pharma companies spend 19 times as much on self-promotion as they do basic research: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/09/pharmaceutical-comp...
If you assert that drugs are so expensive because of the cost to develop them, and yet I have demonstrated that the R&D budget is a small percentage of the money which the drug companies are spending, do you withdraw your assertion? Given the aforementioned lack of sources in this thread I somehow doubt it.
Ah: I found a review/summary of the book which originally sparked this comment. It's The Truth About the Drug Companies, and is by Marcia Angell, the first female editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. The review is available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-tru...
More: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_customer/2011/03/...
If you want to see what drugs cost to develop, just ask the scientists who develop them: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/09/getting_drug...
His numbers don't even pass the sniff test. If you want to find out how much it costs to develop a new drug, there is nothing stopping you from calling a CRO and asking how much they charge for phase III trials (they are all in competition, so they'll freely give you a quote).
The average cost for a phase III trial is approximately $15,000/pt/yr. 1000 patients is a pretty average size trial, so now you are at $15M for one trial and the FDA requires at least two phase III trials.
And that's just the cost of phase III trials which doesn't include: phase I, phase II, manufacturing, regulatory costs, etc. Donald Light's claim that drugs cost $45M to develop is laughable and the could only come from someone with no understanding of drug development.
Drug companies use poor as guinea pigs , marking up the price for wealthy nations and worst of all , prevent life saving care for billions of people. some on whom the drugs were tested on. So, there is more than one reason this victory is sweet for the developing nations.
p.s sorry about the multiple edits..
Oh yes, I know all about Marcia Angell. She has been rallying against the pharma industry for over a decade. The link I posted also goes into some of the outrageous things she has said that are completely unsupportable.
Here is another article talking about Marcia:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2012/12/14/marcia-...
Does pharma do bad things? Yes! But claiming there is a pharma conspiracy to drive down "target" cholesterol levels so they can sell more drugs is laughable. It ignores all the scientific evidence (most of it NOT from pharma companies), much of it published in her the journal she works for.
If these companies could produce more drugs that would help patients and ensure that doctors, hospitals, patients and insurers knew enough about those drugs to spend more money to acquire them by spending less money on marketing, of course they would. So would Toyota, or IBM or any other company with something to sell.
That doesn't even make sense. Neither R&D nor marketing come out of profits. Otherwise they wouldn't be profits...
Ironically, I can't get at that article because of a paywall, but my guess would be that HuffPo is defining "basic research" in a way that excludes most of the R&D spending (which undoubtedly goes to "applied research") and is defining "promotion" in a way that includes not just advertising, but things like the sales network.
The fact is that say Merck spends much more on R&D than on advertising: http://www.fiercebiotech.com/special-reports/7-merck-top-15-..., http://www.fiercepharma.com/special-reports/merck-top-13-adv...
I never asserted your second clause. Pharma makes a shit-ton of profit, indeed.
I personally am grateful for your research in this comment(+1)- I regret that I don't have the time to have a proper discussion right now. Perhaps someone else could pick it up.