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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

To play devil's advocate: what incentive does a private company have to do all the lab work necessary to identify a particular gene sequence as being predictive of cancer and make it publicly known? Without patents, Myriad would've just kept the gene sequence in question secret instead of publishing it. Would someone have rediscovered the proper sequence before Myriad's patent term would've expired? What would be their incentive to share it?

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One incentive to do research is because they get paid through other means.

A report on the Sources of Cancer Research Funding in the United States (http://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/Activity%20Files/Disease/NC...) found that only 31% of the funding in cancer research is from industry. The majority is from tax money (federal and state), which stand for about 63% of all funding. The rest is non-profit.

Maybe that 31% would be lower without patents. Some might still do the investing because they earn money on related products (for-profit hospitals to name one). Maybe the costs in medical institutions and research labs would go down because they can spend less to lawyers. Maybe the state would be willing to spend more and have more directed taxed to replace the lost industry funding.

But we are only talking about 31%, a number I would very much like to see updated for 2013. It also a number as reported by the industry itself, so its worth asking how true it is. The only number we can be fully sure on is the billions of state and federal funding.

The alternatives in this case are, as you note, either public funding, or alternative means of monetization (e.g. a for-profit hospital). I think on the whole public funding is the way to go for this kind of medical research. The other alternative is precisely the kind of thing the patent system was designed to avoid. Is it really preferable to have private, for-profit hospitals using proprietary techniques that they don't publish in order to keep a competitive edge?

This is why medical and scientific research should not have profit motives attached to them. It creates perverted incentives like the situation you describe above.

Nobody "attaches" the profit motive--it is inherent. Nobody spends millions of dollars on research and dedicates years of their lives to it for free. They either do it because the government is bankrolling the endeavor (like much medical research), or because their is a potential for profit. I'm fully willing to entertain the idea that the government should be funding all this research that would otherwise be done by private industry, but someone has to pay for the R&D.

What would incentivize people to actually go into research if that were the case? Our best would all be bankers, lawyers, and mobile app developers.

Lawyers are a bad example as they don't run on profit based accounting, typically. More of a fee for service arrangement. There do exist some lawyers with for-profit side businesses, or solely work for a for-profit business, but they're probably outnumbered by law firms + sole proprietor service provider + employed by non-profits + employed by .gov

There is no obvious reason other than tradition and cultural goals that a lawyer has to be paid $200/hr instead of $20/hr, ditto no reason a postdoc biomedical researcher has to be paid $30K/yr instead of $300K/yr. The supply of STEM grads is too high leading to low pay and the supply of lawyers is too low leading to high pay, but if you can convince the kids to select different majors, go ahead.

We live in a central govt controlled economy. If you have control of the government, which we probably don't, then you can also select the priorities.

It also has the assumption that profit is the only reason why people work. Simple salary arrangements work pretty well for most people, as does contract work. Some other ways people make money without profit include prizes (Nobel, etc) and being cultural heros (pro sports athletes, unfortunately definitely not biomedical research scientists)

Finally some people just love the subject area and will voluntarily starve their family, look at any STEM other than CS/IT/high level applied medical (aka hospital dr cardiologist etc). I would not bet on it, or demand that only people taking a vow of poverty are "real" scientists or whatever. But there always will be some nuts willing to eat Ramen every night for the rest of their lives.

>There is no obvious reason other than tradition and cultural goals that a lawyer has to be paid $200/hr instead of $20/hr, ditto no reason a postdoc biomedical researcher has to be paid $30K/yr instead of $300K/yr.

The average lawyer doesn't make $200/hr. You can't compare your average biomedical postdoc to the top law school graduates. A biomedical postdoc is sacrificing pay now because he probably hopes to get a job as a tenured professor some day. It's something like clerking for a judge after law school.

Another thing, law students pay for law school, many of them rack up $150k in debt before they even start working. Most STEM PhD candidates are being paid while going to grad school.

>The supply of STEM grads is too high leading to low pay and the supply of lawyers is too low leading to high pay, but if you can convince the kids to select different majors, go ahead.

There are far too many law school graduates each year for the amount of lawyers demanded. Unless you can get into a good school and graduate near the top, law school is probably a bad idea. While the prospects for most STEM degrees look much better than other majors.

Sorry, but law firms operate for-profit. Partners are the owners of those firms and don't give away their profits to charities at the end of every fiscal year. This is quite a ludicrous assertion. Several partners at top law firms pocket several million a year outside of their client fees. For many lawyers from top schools, making partner is the ultimate goal because of the potential windfall.

http://www.law.com/jsp/ca/PubArticleCA.jsp?id=1202588541180&...

I think the problem is I'm using "profit" as an accounting term and you're using it as a synonym for "money".

Ideologically speaking, there is no incentive.

You do it because you're a good person who cares more about humanity than profit.

such a good person does not, on average, exist. No one cares about "humanity" - they care about their immediate loved ones, and they care about profit.

Gandhi, King, and Mandela would like to disagree with you.

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