I think you're case for the pharmaceuticals is a bit biased towards the 
official propaganda of those companies.
Reality is much more complex.
There is the problem that very few new medicines come on the market. The 
rules are probably just too strict. And the main improvements are mostly 
done, most things nowadays are statistical improvements. What the 
companies are doing is finding ways to extend an existing patent, not 
creating new ones. (A bit like Walt Disney finding ways to extend the IP 
on mickey mouse indefinitely.) The money they earn with that only for a 
small fraction goes into research, most of it goes to marketing. Which 
often means that a new patient group is identified (or conjured from 
thin air) and doctors are pushed to prescribe it. Backed by scientific 
studies that are less objective than one would hope.
In the mean time proven effective medicine is withdrawn from the market, 
because they make more money on another medicine.
And we need Bill Gates to fund the medicines that are needed but not 
profitable.
It is clear that the current way of funding medicines has a lot of 
problems, but we don't have a better alternative yet.




On 21-9-2012 17:57, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> http://tinyurl.com/9vvsvob
>
> Interesting idea I suppose.
>
> About 50% of the comments seem to be "No, we should just ban ALL
> PATENTS! Because patents are EVIL! All you guys are doing is
> legitimising patents."
>
> Now maybe we don't need software patents. I don't know. But what I *do*
> know is this: The pharmaceutical industry wouldn't exist without patents.
>
> You see, a drug is a bit like a big-budget movie: It costs *billions* of
> dollars to develop and test a drug to the point where it gets licensed
> for use on humans. But once the drug has been invented, it costs about
> 0.0003 USD per pill to manufacture the stuff. The *only* reason anyone
> is willing to pay billions of dollars to develop new drugs is that they
> know that if it gets licensed, then for the next X years they can sell
> this stuff for $$$ per pill - i.e., vastly more than what it costs to
> manufacture.
>
> Without patents, a company would spend billions on making a new drug,
> get it licensed, and then every other company on the globe would start
> manufacturing it and selling it for peanuts - because, let's face it,
> they have no design costs to recoup.
>
> Of course, this would not happen - what would *actually* happen is that
> nobody would develop new drugs in the first place. And that would be
> pretty catastrophic.
>
> So what's the alternative? Honestly, I don't know... Perhaps if drug
> licenses were only granted to the company that did all the safety
> testing? That might work?
>


-- 
Women are the canaries of science. When they are underrepresented
it is a strong indication that non-scientific factors play a role
and the concentration of incorruptible scientists is also too low

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