-------- Name: Anil Maliyekkel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 12/3/06 Linus Torvalds ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/3/06 wrote: --------------------------- >Do you think penicillin was invented because Alexander >Fleming or St Mary's Hospital (where he was working) was >looking to make a huge profit?
... >Btw, penicillin is again a great example: not only was >it discovered without any patent push what-so-ever, but: This is a poor argument. If we relied on accidental discoveries to advance medicine, we wouldn't have very many antibiotics today to treat the multitude of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that have popped up since the advent of penicillin (and other naturally produced antibiotics). If you can't rely on nature to do all the hard work, you are going to have to spend lots of money. And even when nature has done the hard work, finding the results either depends on luck or spending lots of money. The question is where does that money come from. Name: Chung Leong ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 12/3/06 Linus Torvalds ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/3/06 wrote: --------------------------- >That's a rather idiotic argument. It's sadly a very common >one. Since your position is that the system is distorted, it's only fair to ask to what an undistorted system is and how it'd function. >How do you think most drugs got invented historically? I think most drugs used today were at some point under patent protection. Can't find a survey that confirms this, but a cursory search at the USPTO indicates that most drugs are covered by multiple patents. >What kind of sad and dark world do you live in, that you >believe that people only do things because they want to >help "big pharma" make billions and billions of dollars? It live in a world where researchers expect to make a salary, where facility and equirpment cost money, where drug test volunteers are cared for, and where consumers demand compensation if a drug turns out to be unsafe. Even if an organization does not seek to make a profit, clearly it has to avoid losses in order to continue operation. >In other words, one of the most important drugs of modern >times totally lays to waste your idiotic and unrealistic >argument. Why don't you bring up the paper, removeable-type, gun-powder, and compass too. Those are important inventions. Better yet, lay waste to my argument with the wheel. >So. Try to back up your opinions with facts instead >of trying to make the inane (and unsupportable) argument >that patent protection rackets are the only way to make >progress. Let me just randomly picked a few drugs: Cipro was patented. Ibuprofen was patented. Asprinin was patented. AZT was patened. Prozac was patented. Ecstasy was patented. Cortisone was patented. >There is basically zero support for the notion that >technical advances (in any area) depend on strong IP laws, >and there are lots of examples where the biggest advances >were done in the absense of strong IP rules. IP protection channels resources to those making technical advances, who can then perform more research to beget more advances. The logic is simple enough. Corporations aren't the only ones benefitting. The Bayh-Dole act has been a huge boon to American universities. And the results show. The Shanghai education ranking (which emphasizes research) is dominated by American schools. This year's Nobel science prizes were swept by Americans. Meanwhile, Europe is fretting about a brain-drain. Name: Anil Maliyekkel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 12/4/06 Linus Torvalds ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/3/06 wrote: --------------------------- >I've got news for that person: a lot of human >advances are "accidents". The interesting thing is how >those "accidents" just keep on happening to people who >are interested in how things work, and they start looking >at what the reason for the "accident" was. At that point, >it's not an accident at all any more: it's how science >gets done. Being "accidental" in no way changes that basic >fact. Yes accidents happen, but they don't happen at a fast enough pace. And we can't rely on nature to provide us with all the solutions. The multitude of beta-lactam drugs designed from knowledge gained from studying penicillin and the few other naturally occuring drugs in the same family and from studying the resistance bacterial mechanisms to those drugs were obviously not accidental creations. They were mostly created by researchers working for companies or academic institutions interested in product development or building IP portfolios. >Btw, of the drugs you mention, at least a couple weren't >done by commercial companies at all, which totally moots >your point. At least AZT was from a University with US >government funding, for example. IOW, even when patented, >important drugs were not discovered because of >any patent, but because of very simple and direct needs: >people paying for it because of basic science and health >reasons. >So I don't think you have a very strong case to say that >patents "drive" the industry. > >Linus AZT was synthesized in the 1960s as a cancer drug by researchers at a US university funded by the NIH, but was not effective and was highly toxic. AZT was identified as an HIV drug by a team of scientists working at the NCI and Burroughs Wellcome, and the clinical trial was subsequently run by that phamaceutical company. Name: rwessel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 12/4/06 Dean Kent ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/4/06 wrote: --------------------------- >What you (and others) are doing is claiming a causal relationship between >development >of various inventions and patents. What Linus is doing is saying that there is >no definite evidence to indicate that these inventions would not have been >developed >even without patents. In fact, history has shown that very smart people tend to >create new things simply for the joy of it, or because they are somehow >compelled to. I'm quite sure that somebody someplace will continue to poke at stuff, and discover a new and useful drug. Unfortunately that accomplishes precisely *nothing* without tens or hundreds of millions in investment to get it past the regulators. Pasteur might have discovered penicillin on his own, but he didn't need to get it approved by the FDA. >Whether it would be slower or not is a question that can be debated, and one >might >be able to present a very convincing argument that the money involved has >provided >the resources to speed up the research and development. OTOH, Linus has also >presented >an alternative argument that is just as convincing by using x86. One cannot >seriously >claim that Intel and AMD have not poured billions of dollars into research for >a >product that neither one has a monopoly on. No he hasn't. This is a strawman, and a bad one. Intel and AMD are not pouring billions into x86 development, they're pouring billions into Pentium, Core, Athlon, Xeon, Duron, Opteron, etc. development. Why shouldn't Intel, after the P4/Prescott fiasco, simply have done a quick micrograph reverse engineering and respin of an Opteron on their semiconductor excellent process and sold it as a Pentium 5? Not that doing so wouldn't have been hard, but it would certainly have been *much* less expensive than what they spent on Core. Why hasn't AMD replaced their CPUs with a Core Duo clone? If you used the same strawman on drug companies, you'd be trying to argue that nobody would invest in a new high blood pressure drug unless they had a monopoly on high blood pressure drugs. Clearly false. GSK may have a patent (and monopoly) on one high blood pressure drug, and Novartis another. But GSK can't start selling Diovan. At least I agree with Linus that something like an ISA should not be patentable. Name: Chung Leong ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 12/4/06 Linus Torvalds ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/3/06 wrote: --------------------------- >What you claimed was that without patents, there would >not exist any drug market. You're basically claiming that >the drugs you mention wouldn't even exist without >patents, and I don't think you have any data what-so-ever >to back up that ludicrous claim. A common problem in social science is the impossibility of conducting controlled-test. Economists, for instance, can't divide a country into equal halves and implement one set of policies in one and another set in the other. Then how do they know, say, the Soviet system in the US wouldn't lead to dramatic improvement in the life of its citizens? There has never been an Soviet Republic of America after all. What we can do is draw conclusions from other countries' experience. but cross-comparing the situation in different countries we can eliminate cultural phenomenons as factors (e.g. that communist secret police isn't a merely holdover from Tsarist time) and arrive at fairly firm conclusion that, yes, the Soviet system is pretty rotten. We can do the same analysis in regards to patents. The drugs I mentioned were all invented in countries with strong patent laws (mostly in America, a couple were from pre-war Germany, I think). Name any drug and that will likely be true. Why did the West (the US in particular) dominate the field? Why weren't drugs invented in Soviet Russia, India, or China? Basic science weren't lacking in these countries. Nor were medical personnel Their pharmaceutical sectors were fully capable of syntheticizing drugs invented in the West. The possibility for new drugs to be developed certainly existed in these countries. India in particular deserves our attention. Prior to the country joining the WTO in 2005, patents on drugs weren't respected. So drug firms just busied themselves making cheap copies of western drugs. Now that the law has been changed, investment is pouring into drug R&D. A lot of it comes from western firms eager to take advantage of the lower wages. But local firms are opening research centers too. The same thing is happening in China (to a lesser extent, because rule of law is still weak there). Novartis recently announced that it's going to spend $100 million to build a research center in Shanghai. >My counter-claim was not that patents don't exist (they >obviously do), but I wanted to point out that a lot of >drugs came to be even without them, and despite >them. In other words, there's no real reason to believe >that patents (in the current form, at least) actually help >us get better drugs. One is not a lot. I can give your another: deer testicles. The Chinese think that they cures impotent. There's no patent on them. >Btw, of the drugs you mention, at least a couple weren't >done by commercial companies at all, which totally moots >your point. At least AZT was from a University with US >government funding, for example. IOW, even when patented, >important drugs were not discovered because of >any patent, but because of very simple and direct needs: >people paying for it because of basic science and health >reasons. Ummm, as I was saying, universities can obtain patents on federally funded research. Exactly what motivates researchers I don't know as I can't read minds. But it can't be denied that patent income allows more research projects to go ahead. Rather than an expense that has to be balanced against teaching, they can be seen as investments that pay for themselves. Name: Tom W ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 12/4/06 Linus Torvalds ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/3/06 wrote: --------------------------- >Chung Leong ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/3/06 wrote: >> >>That's a strange way to argue it. You're speaking as >>though there's a "normal" market in which new drugs >>without patent protection would be developed. Let say >>we remove this market distortion. Can you explain how >>the economics of developing a drug that could be >>immediately copied by others? > >That's a rather idiotic argument. It's sadly a very common >one. > >How do you think most drugs got invented historically? The vast majority of drugs now in use were invented by corporate research laboratories. The motivation was revenues that would allow those corporations to recoup the costs of developing and testing the drugs. You can find a list of the 200 most-prescribed _generic_ drugs here: http://www.rxlist.com/top200.htm You'll notice that virtually all generic drugs were patented originally. And that list is only the _generic_ drugs--all of the brand-name drugs are under patent. >In other words, your whole argument is not only totally >stupid and scary, it's also provably irrelevant. >Most of the drugs people use today are actually not even >protected by patents, and were invented totally without >any of those protections. That assertion is false, as I documented above. Almost all the drugs people use today are (or were) protected by patents. >Do you think penicillin was invented because Alexander >Fleming or St Mary's Hospital (where he was working) was >looking to make a huge profit? > >...Btw, penicillin is again a great example: not only was >it discovered without any patent push what-so-ever, but: >what pushed it to be developed was actually World War >II. > >...In other words, one of the most important drugs of modern >times totally lays to waste your idiotic and unrealistic >argument. You've provided only a single example of a modern drug developed without patent, out of thousands of drugs currently available. The question is not whether _any_ drug has ever been developed without patent--clearly, several have. Nobody is suggesting we prohibit non-patent discovery. The question is whether _all_ (or most) of the drugs now available would have been developed without patent, and whether the patent system is on net balance a benefit to society. I, for one, do not believe that we would all be better off if our drug choices were reduced to penicillin, baking soda, and morphine. In fact, many of us would be dead. >It's sad how people seem to believe - despite all evidence >to the contrary - that somehow patents are "required" to >make people even want to develop drugs. At present, bringing a drug to market requires subjecting the drug to safety tests which currently take 9 years, generate more than 100,000 pages in documentation, and cost over $800 million. That is the minimum requirement for FDA approval of a drug. I doubt very much that the hurdle would be overcome in the absence of anticipated revenues. For example, in the course of my career, I've gotten to know a few of the vast army of employees which conduct drug trials, and I don't believe any of them would conduct those trials if their job didn't require it. Few of them were passionately devoted to collecting detailed statistics about every possible side-effect that every test candidate may have experienced. Few of them were passionately devoted to compiling enormous binders of data as the FDA requires. Given the current hurdles of drug development, I doubt very much that a "gentlemen scientist" or a hobbyist could now bring even a single drug to market. In fact I doubt that even a small group of extremely motivated people could do it. Name: rwessel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 12/4/06 Linus Torvalds ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/2/06 wrote: --------------------------- >rwessel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on 12/1/06 wrote: >> >>In effect, U.S. drug consumers are subsidizing drug >>development for the rest of the world. While I don't feel >>so bad about cheap drugs for poor countries, it really >>irks me that many very wealthy countries are freeloading >>here. > >I call bullshit on that one. > >"freeloading" is not what they are doing. If it didn't >make sense to make those drugs with prices that aren't >monopolistic (or are regulated), drug companies wouldn't >do it. Which I certainly acknowledged (read the sentence immediately preceding what you quoted). As far as I know, in essentially all cases the price-controlled drugs are being sold at a reasonable profit over their manufacturing (and other on-going) costs. The "freeloading" applies to recovery of R&D expenses. And sure, there are all sorts of really annoying distortions in the market, not least of which is that "best" is often equated with "most profitable", which often results in a slew of "me-to" drugs, but central research planning doesn't have all that bright a history either. And many of the reality distortions come from the patient/legal side of things - a drug that is a tiny bit more effective than its predecessor is hugely preferred, no matter the expense (especially if youre not paying that expanse), since failure to use it will likely get you sued for providing sub-standard care. In the "real" world, if airplane manufacturer "B" builds an airplane with lower operating costs than an equivalent model from manufacturer "A", they'll be able to charge a premium, but only one rationally supportable by the cost savings over the life of the aircraft (the airlines being fairly rational and hardnosed about that sort of thing). And certainly I think there are plenty of reforms needed in the IP regimes of the world. But you avoid the basic question: What motivates me to blow nine figures on getting a new drug to market, if a generic maker can start selling the same drug five minutes later at a price that need only recoup manufacturing costs? Again, for most drugs, manufacturing costs are inconsequential, or nearly so, as is the difficulty in setting up a "clone" manufacturing line. Nor would I ever suggest all drug research would stop. Certainly not, but it would largely stop at places intending to make a profit from the activity. Lots of interesting stuff comes out of government and university labs, but then what? Who decides when you go ahead and pay for the endless trials and safety studies? Perhaps some bureaucrat in the central research planning department? You've at least acknowledged that those of us in the closed-source end of the software industry have a right to exist and to take a swing at things with our business model (and mind you, I really appreciate that - a few of the OSS zealots appear to want to deny that we have the right to exist at all, and you may know who I mean. ;-) ). I know that *I* find the prospect of charging customers thousands of times the cost of a replicated CD is what keeps me paying programmer's salaries. Something I can only do because of IP protection. (See, I've dragging this thread back to computing!) Why is that OK, and not the same by a drug company? Is it more than the usual disdain (How *dare* you make money off people being sick! You immoral b******!) for the notion of making a profit in health care? As near as I can tell, the potential for profit motivates people to invest *a lot*. That's a good thing, in my book. Tell me again how I'm motivated to spend $100m if I have no payback. -------- regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss