Word: patent
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...Canadian Supreme Court denied a Harvard bid to patent a genetically-engineered mouse last week in a move that has broad implications for research into higher life forms in Canada...
...true. Today, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick will be attending a summit on the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement, and many activist groups, including Oxfam, Student Global Aids Campaign and the Harvard Aids Coalition, are concerned he will push for patent protections. This move would prevent the manufacture of the generic medications that millions of people in the developing world, where patented medicines are prohibitively expensive, depend on in order to survive...
Zoellick is wrong to call for more stringent patent protections, but simply loosening or removing patent restrictions is at best a short-term solution. Solving the health crisis in developing countries in the long run will require a radical shift in the role of government in medical research...
Supporters of the patent system argue that rival companies should not be allowed to copy and produce medicinal drugs developed by other firms, insisting that without well-defended intellectual property rights, medications would not be developed at all. It is true that, if medical research were left to the free market without a patent system, companies would have no incentive to invest in researching and developing new drugs. After all, if they did develop the drugs and pay the high costs involved, other companies, which had not shouldered those research costs, could simply copy the new medicines and sell them...
There is, fortunately, a way out of this dilemma. If national governments discarded the patent system in the medication market and instead assumed responsibility for researching and developing new medicines, the incentive problem could be avoided without creating state-protected monopolies. Instead, every company would be allowed to copy and manufacture the drugs developed by the government. The new competition between many firms would drive down prices and, in turn, make them affordable by those who so urgently need them...