>From the article:
Drug companies can take small comfort in the fact that Hamied might be out
of business in five years. As a signatory to the World Trade
Organization's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
agreement, India must by 2005 reinstate product patents.
But by then it may be too late. The noose around the drug companies--from
public interest groups, the elderly and politicians--can only draw
tighter. One WTO executive puts the issue in blunt but believable terms:
"Either the prices give, or the patent system will have to give."
The net result of socialist luddite attacks against pharmaceutical
companies, as I understand it, will be that the pharmaceuticals will shift
their research and development to drugs like Viagra and Prozac, IOW
psychoactive drugs that can maintain their high prices. Drug companies
will have to relinquish development of cures for aging because they can't
make a profit (due to something called compulsory licensing).
In the long run, geriatric luddites will die off, thus freeing drug
companies to recover the cost of anti-aging R&D via the device of
reinstated patent laws. Anyway, I think the drug companies need to start
developing drugs that will enable us to merge with AI and Alife. Forget a
cure for AIDS, let's find a cure for luddite recalcitrance.
Stay hungry,
--J. R.
3M TA3
"It's not your vote that counts,
it's who counts your vote."
--Al Gore
(Or was it Joseph Stalin... Hitler? Oh well, one of those socialists.)
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