You take public money to do research, any fruits from that money belong to the public. You don't get to start companies and patent the end result and get rich off of our money. If you purely take private money you work in some startup you can do stuff like this. Even then I would argue that understanding or discovering some biological entity should not be patentable.
> You take public money to do research, any fruits from that money belong to the public
TBF we did try this in the US, and this is exactly how things worked for decades. That rule was eventually shot down for a whole host of reasons.
> If you purely take private money you work in some startup you can do stuff like this
How about this scenario:
Person A invents something using public money.
Person B creates a start-up using Person A's invention.
Person C needs said invention, and can only get it from Person B, who charges them for it.
In other words, if the fruits of the labor are going to be extracted by someone, shouldn't that someone be the person who made the actual discovery (assuming they're willing to do the business side as well)?
We've been having this discussion on HN for years now, and I haven't seen many workable alternatives to the current system as it applies to pharma.
A lot of this boils down to risk and risk mitigation. Because the monetary outlays and failure risks are so considerable to shepherd a technology through the entire life cycle from conception to commercial availability, big pharma has to be extraordinarily selective about where they place their bets.
They generally do not invest in early stage developments. In fact, these days, we have to find partners or spin out startups to help further the research to even get to the point that pharma wants to talk about licensing.
The patent protections allow the time to get to that point and ensure our partners that they will have some protection to assure revenues (assuming the technology even makes it to market) sufficient to offset the costs associated with the various phases of clinical trials.
It's by no means a perfect system, and there are some slightly different models out there. Singapore, for example, requires the research dollars to be reimbursed upon commercialization. That is a fairly small ecosystem to analyze, however, when compared to the scale of US investment via agencies like the NIH and NSF.
Edit to add disclaimer: We have patents licensed to the company referenced in this article (Editas).
