‘So do you patent the sun?’, Jonas Salk eloquently said in an interview with Edward R. Murro on a TV show, when asked why he didn’t apply for a patent for it. his polio vaccine.
Today, polio is almost no longer a great concern of people, but in the first half of the 20th century, it was one of the most feared diseases. During the 1940s and 1950s, half a million people died from polio every year. One of the most famous patients of this disease was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and although he survived, he was left with hemiplegia.
And then, Salk appeared as a savior with a vaccine that he tested directly on himself and family members. Just two years after Salk’s vaccine became widely available, the number of polio cases has dropped to just one in ten. Salk may have made a fortune from his invention but instead, he donated it to humanity, because in his opinion it is the intellectual property of the common people, like the sun, no one has exclusive rights to own the sun. . Rolling Stone magazine painting depicts pharmaceutical companies as a large vulture profiting from COVID-19. Comparing vaccines to the sun is a linguistic error on Salk’s part, because the sun is a product of the universe (or god), and vaccines are not. In the 18th century, the doctor Edward Jenner made a boy immune to smallpox by taking fluid from the wound of a woman who had had cowpox (a cowpox disease) and injected him, from That was the first time a vaccine was created. While injecting wound fluid from one person into another does not qualify Jenner for any patents, most vaccines today are much more complicated and require a team of experts to spend months, even even years of research and testing. In other words, vaccines are a human invention. However, Salk’s comparison only implies his belief that, in essence, the purpose of science is to serve humanity unconditionally. Salk’s story deserves a repeat at a time when the Biden government has a desire to remove intellectual property rights over vaccines so that poor countries can also access this knowledge and save lives. its citizens. But, many European countries objected. Even the leaders of giant pharmaceutical corporations also objected. They say the move will stifle and destroy the motivation to improve vaccines for businesses and scientists working for them. And they are absolutely correct. Profit is a reward for those who deserve it. Frederick Winslow Taylor, known as the father of scientific management, at the beginning of the 20th century put forward a theory that greatly influenced production systems around the world. Its basic is: money is the motivator. Although there have been many theories with ideas that go against it, after all, it is not Cuba Gooding, Jr. got a supporting role in the movie “Jerry McGuire” thanks to a scene in the phone shouting to the male lead Tom Cruise: “Show me my money!” or what? We all love that line and it’s classic because it’s so real, so raw, so true. Money and profits are very important. Drug companies cannot be told to sacrifice their profits when, as the New York Times puts it, “pharmaceutical corporations are addicted to huge profits”. Calculating from 2000-2018, the world’s 35 largest pharmaceutical corporations alone generated $11.5 trillion in revenue and a net profit of $8.6 trillion. The pharmaceutical industry’s net profit margin is higher than any other industry. And it’s been like that since the mid-1950s. In “Pharmaceuticals: Greed, Lies, and Poisoning America,” author and investigative journalist Gerald Posner recounts the stories of the early days of some of the biggest pharmaceutical giants and how they built their empire. As a story happened in 1990, German company Bayer released a “divine” pain reliever aspirin with a name inspired by “hero” in German. They promote it as a treatment for a dozen diseases: colds, coughs, asthma, epilepsy, stomach cancer, multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder. They also claim that it is safe for children. Are you curious to know what kind of medicine that cures all diseases is no different from the drugs advertised by quacks on Facebook? Please, that drug is… heroin. Or another story during World War II, when the advent of antibiotics helped pharmaceutical companies to get rid of the reputation of specializing in producing addictive drugs to become pioneers in saving lives, these companies immediately applied for a patent for a series of antibiotics that could be used for many health problems and created a frenzy for doctors to prescribe antibiotics for 90% of the cases when patients came to see them, even though they did not practice them. the need for antibiotics to cure the disease. The disastrous consequences of the antibiotic craze are now starting to become more pronounced. But, that’s okay, for the pharmaceutical companies, it’s important that they make a profit. Profit may not be Salk’s driving force, but it is the driving force of pharmaceutical companies. But today’s world is also much more complicated than before, it is difficult for single individuals to create a specific power because the world is operated by corporations with centipedes growing all over the globe. We can’t tell tigers not to eat meat, that’s their nature and we can’t ask big pharmaceutical companies to be as “humane” as Salk. Illustration of “polio soldier” Jonas Salk on the cover of Time magazine. Pharmaceutical companies also argue that removing patents with COVID-19 vaccines will set a bad precedent and cause many other inventions to be removed in the future. But, they never questioned the fact that, constantly applying for patents also makes everything patentable, even the human genes – which are inherently natural – become obsolete. become someone’s intellectual property. In 2012, a case caused a stir when the biotech company Myriad Genetics was sued for holding a patent for two genes related to ovarian and breast cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2. They weren’t the only ones at the time who possessed the gene. About 20% of the human genome was then owned by a corporation or a scientist. The petitioner argued that Myriad could not possess genes just as one could not own gold. But, Myriad compared the gene to a baseball bat, although it has natural materials, but cutting out which gene segment is a scientific choice. After many long years, finally Myriad lost the patent but let’s imagine for many years, the gene in our body belongs to someone’s intellectual property, which is very absurd but still blatantly exists. . And after all, does removing some research patents hurt scientists’ motivation to do research? Roentgen refused to apply for a patent for X-rays and what was his reason? His excuse was that it would limit the progress of this discovery! And instead of damaging the motivation for research, his later successors in the field of radioactivity were Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, who were honored not only for their discovery of radium, nor for them. not only because they found radium at the expense of their health, but also because they found radium. Traded his health but gave it away to the world for nothing. You could say Roentgen was already a millionaire by inheriting the family fortune so he didn’t need more money but Marie Curie was different, she was later unable to buy 1 gram of radium, the element she discovered herself. But she never regretted it. Marie Curie said: “Radium is not meant to enrich anyone. Radium is an element and it belongs to man.” Roentgen or Marie Curie are still single individuals. We have the right to hope in the noble hearts of single individuals, but we should not hope in the kindness of tigers, should not hope in the noble hearts of corporations.
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