Don’t want anything to break because of careless workers.

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http://www.viddy-up.com/learn-howto/technology/

Have a great day,

Greg

That wasn’t the question. None of the drugs you refer to cost very much to develop or research.

So the fact that they’ve been patented at all doesn’t one jot build a case for patents being necessary.

Your question simply lacks relevance – because patents are created after the fact that a drug has already been discovered. It is not a requirement and not an incentive for the research.

“You are trying very hard to avoid naming an example of an unpatented novel drug after claiming there are lots, nay — the majority.”

New drugs have been made without patents all the damn time. And still is. If what you described were true, research would be impossible to begin with.

Learn2Read.

The point isn’t that someone will ALWAYS try to patent a drug after it’s been found. That’s the way the current patent system works – which consumes a ridiculously disproportionate part of the actual development costs.

The point is that almost no drugs were developed which would even require a patent in order to make the money back to begin with. I named one of the very few exceptions to that.

Research costs in 2001 for sequencing an entire genome – 100 million USD.
Research costs in 2011 for sequencing the same genome – less than 10k USD.

You keep arguing from the perspective that medical core research needs multiple billions of dollars worth of equipment and staff – and that hasn’t been true for over twenty years.

Even for medical patents, the utility has closed.

Trial subjects are arranged for by asking for volunteers, in most cases. They cost nothing in comparison. Try again.

90% of the bureaucracy isn’t needed in any way other than to ensure the patent is safeguarded. Safety sheets and similar legal checks required to satisfy local law requirements occupy the rest of that budget.

Medical research today is nothing magical. It switched from the realm of the huge laboratory staffed by hundreds with the advent of computer modelling. Today the actual invention of a new medication requires one Professor and a small team of postdocs. And time.

Before you even get to the stage of experimentation you can already conveniently model and exclude the thousand dead-ends you would previously have had to go through with painstaking care one-by-one just using existing technology.

After that we come to actual manufacture of prototypes and testing…

PCR technology units used to cost 50k+ USD. Today you can get a quality unit for less than 5% of that. DNA sequencers used to cost even more and the progress in chain-termination technology brought the cost of sequencing an entire genome down from 100 million USD in 2001 to roughly 10k USD in 2011. Protein sequencing has largely followed this trend. Your arguments look like someone proclaiming the cost of processor time in the age where ENIAC was the top-notch model.

Most advanced and basic research method costs have dropped by more than 95% since 2001. Small wonder since the material used is often small proteins, whose primary cost lay in the fact that it used to be hard to manufacture them.

Today if a computer dreams up a protein with a complex secondary or tertiary structure which might selectively block a ribosome from creating virus capsid building blocks you can simply feed the sequence and the desired conformation into a machine and retrieve the finished product a few hours later.

So, no examples since the actual rule is that every medication has been initially researched thanks to postdocs in universities running on state funding.

Kindly provide me examples of drugs whose initial research did NOT come from public money.

Break down those “10 Billion” and you’ll find actual research and development to occupy almost nothing of that budget. The vast majority of that development process consists of marketing and bureaucracy.

The clinical trials are more often than not directly sponsored by the taxpayer since the administration is part and parcel of the care he or she receives.

“…and only about one in five make it to the market.”

In pharmacology 101 I learned that only 10% of any given drugs on the market actually have a clinical measurable effect. Your point?

Like I said, medical patents is the least evil conceivable example of patents. And even there it’s really hard to justify them.