How Much Money Did Jonas Salk Forfeit By Not Patenting The Polio Vaccine? | Hacker News Reader

How Much Money Did Jonas Salk Forfeit By Not Patenting The Polio Vaccine?

forbes.com

21 pointsadventured42 comments

That's not the right question. The right question is how many more people would have died if he had.

Note that the patent system did exist and he chose not to use it, so murky questions of incentivization should that system exist or not exist needn't be raised. He just chose not to enrich himself so that more people could live. 10,000 Nathan Myhrvold's couldn't fill one of this guy's shoes.

Yeah, came here to say that. such a question is the perfect representation for why our healthcare is so broken.

The other aspect to consider is that his discovery for the vaccine was only possible due to the HeLa gene lines, which were taken without permission and used in a variety of 20th century discoveries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

Like many fortunes, one made on the back of a Polio vaccine would have been made with a crime, originally...

I think Salk was too interested in simply eradicating polio to think of personal enrichment though.

Am I the only one who struggles to see anything terribly wrong with what the Johns Hopkins doctors did?

How much would you want to consent to a tissue sample? Me ... I'd do it for free to help science. I think most people would consent for $100 dollars and almost everyone would consent for $1000. So that puts some numbers on the 'crime'.

At heart it's a problem of fairness, not just consent. I bet you'd agree to sell me the rights to your post for $1000. But if I went on to make twenty million dollars off your post and your total payment was $1000, that would be unfair and exploitative. Sure, you agreed, but the context changed a huge amount. In short, if you contribute in a significant way to something, you should reap some of the benefits. Even a fraction of a percent could have let her family live comfortably.

I have a feeling your numbers are just nice and round and unrealistic as well. If I knew that my genes were going to result in something worth hundreds of millions of dollars for some pharma corp, I would want a lot more than $1000.

-1'd for no reason other than you disagree, rather than me trolling? Pretty pathetic.

Imagine a disease in the modern world today that primarily affects young children and causes parents to bleach the streets and sidewalks. Local officials quarantine blocks of neighborhoods when someone is found with the disease, because they don't know what else to do. Now imagine someone was selling a cure at the time. There would be riots, the seller would be strung up, and his drugs/methods would be copied.

I think we have great difficulty today understanding what life was like in parts of America with epidemic breaks before there was a vaccine for polio. There were children in iron lungs for weeks.

I can't imagine anyone developing a vaccine or a cure for something like that and not simply giving it away. The breakthrough with polio doesn't compare to anything else in patentable medicine. Salk's work stands alone.

You don't need to imagine.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iRLtCGzuK...

The lives I'm thinking of weren't just Americans.

>There were children in iron lungs for weeks.

There were people in iron lungs for lifetimes

By not patenting the vaccine, not only did he save lives by providing affordable medicine, but he allowed others to immediately build off of his work.

How many people can claim to have (mostly) freed humanity from a diseases? Think about that. Think about all the pain and suffering that never was.

Especially given that where it made the most difference was in third world countries. If cost had become an issue, this would not have been the case.

I have often wondered, can I do something similar for mankind as a developer?

> How many people can claim to have (mostly) freed humanity from a diseases?

Perhaps Bill Gates, soon. I liked his 60M interview recently, where he has plans for several diseases. Quite awesome.

That's a good question for his financial gain. But how about this one :

How many lives did Jonas Salk saved by not patenting the polio vaccine?

I think it's also a question of: How much money did Jonas Salk gain by not patenting the polio vaccine?

Not to criticize the article, but the implicit assumption is that he would have gotten all of the royalties. But would he have gotten as much scientific credibility in the long run? Would Sabin's vaccine been used exclusively and Salk's vaccine descended into obscurity? How would these consequences have translated into financial gain?

Yeah, if the vaccine was more expensive, would it have been used as much? The calculations here seem a bit like the movie industry, where each download is a lost sale.

But not to take anything away from him. What he did was great, and he probably would have been rich by patenting it. Just not $7bn rich.

The original title had 'money' in it, which is less controversial. The current link title just says 'how much...', no mention of money. This turns it into a philosophical question - lose out on money, gain on moral integrity and altruism.

Uh, it's not like Jonas Salk wound up penniless, either; I'd say he got to have a bigger impact on science than most people who do go the patenting route; hell, there's a research institute that was founded in his name.

I altered the title from "money" to $, because the max title length is 80 characters and it went over that, so I had to hack down a few words.

It would be interesting to make a list of other "open source scientists".

I contribute with one: Cesar Milstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Milstein for more information read specifically "A missed opportunity? The patent saga" http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/exhibitions/milstein/pate...

Calling them Public Domain Scientists would be more accurate...

Yes, I agree.

Awesome! Resolution passed.

noonespecial nailed this one. But allow me to suggest that others who would consider the route of patenting such a necessary invention that they should probably pick a reasonable licensing fee for their work. Why not license your invention for pennies on the copy/individual use? Competitors can compete on price, people can still afford it, and you can still obtain the benefits of your cunning.

Well, that's an interesting question. Much like music, uptake is strongly dependant on price and it's a fallacy to infer that the quantity consumed would be equal if the cost changed.

If there was a higher price due to patents I wouldn't expect so much of the third world to be immunised, as a lot of those countries depended on aid to distribute the vaccine. I'd also expect first world countries without socialised healthcare to have more non-immunised people.

Also many. It's many dollars. </pedant>

Yes, but in this case there is another factor still to consider:

Had he patented the vaccine, the disease would most likely still be endemic, and the immunizations still be sold. How much is that worth?

One could speculate on some factors such as population, uncertainties of the future worldwide validity of the patent (e.g.: How long would the market reserve last) and regulation changes, but the present(past) value of a patent is hard to determine, specially if the world we know doesn't have it.

Also, I don't know what OP meant, but I read 'How much money', not dollars

I have an even deeper factor. With that vaccine restricted, how much poorer would the world be? What advances would not have occurred? What would all of that "wealth" really be worth? What good is being "rich"(1) in a world of poverty?

(1)25 years ago not even the richest men in the world had HD tv. Even if one could focus his wealth to create one for himself, it would have been nearly useless. I'd rather be a poor man in a rich world than a rich man in a poor one.

I think a good counter question would be, how many lives have been lost from companies patenting vital medicines thereby reducing the potential availability of such things?

Parents are all well and good unless people die solely because of them.

Unfortunately, patents may be a "necessary evil". Without the prospect of making money, or at least cover the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to test a new medicine, the risk would be to big.

He didn't patent it because he valued less the money he would make than the lives he would save and, probably to some lesser extent, the glory he would get and the impact he would make in the world (all this were only potentials at the moment of the decision).That not to mention his moral guidelines. Patents exist to incentive innovation through a guarantee of returns over the investment. By not patenting he is declaring that, to him, the returns (not only financial) would be negative on the whole, and that he didn't need the patent system to have a drive to innovate.

Nothing. A life saved is worth eminently more than a dollar earned.

I'd love to see some data on how many people draw the line where on that. $1 for a life, sure you save the life. $10? Life. $1m? $1b? Or $1b for 1000 lives? I'm sure not everyone would state that X lives is always worth more than Y dollars for all values of X and Y.

In a lot of contexts, lives saved (in the US) are valued at $1-10mm. This is based on life insurance premiums for higher risk jobs, availability of marginal life savings for costs in other contexts, etc. Not sure how it applies outside the US.

Interesting, thanks - though that's insurance, not necessarily the same as what people value

It's not just insurance -- it's that we could save a life for $2.49 million in traffic engineering, and tend to do so, but don't for, say, $20mm. It's irrational to spend $20mm to save 1 person from super-rare-expensive-thing but not to spend $2.49mm to save an equivalent person from less-expensive-thing.

The complication is that not all lives are valued the same, and certainly not valued the same by everyone. We spend tens of billions per year to protect the President, which isn't just about his life but about the cost to the economy (and nation in general) if anything happens to him. We probably could save a kid in the ghetto for $50k in job training and mentorship, rather than having him kill someone and/or get killed himself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life is an introduction. It's a pretty fascinating concept.

So what about when we don't know how to value the life in question, you just know that it's a person who will stay alive if you chose, or die if you take $x - I don't know what my own decision would be, yet alone an average decision.

It's one of those odd situations that I think gets a different answer depending on what responsibility you feel. If the entirety of my wealth is $2.5m I don't think I would spend it to save the life of somebody I don't know. But would I go out and murder someone for that money? I don't think so.. and hope not. Both of the same are, I think, true for $100k.

I think right now in the US a life is valued at around a million dollars. Context matters a lot, of course. But don't even try to do a survey because a lot of people will give such sky-high numbers that if they thought things through they'd be afraid to leave their house ever again.

Maybe he didn't think it was patentable.

Everything is patentable.

I remember him being quoted saying it was to save lives and I give him a lot of credit for that.

Polio Vaccine and AIDS... [1]

[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPV_AIDS_hypothesis)

The very wiki page you cite notes that this has been disproven and links several sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com