Comment by llamaimperative
3 days ago
There should be a method + requirement to pay royalties back to public funding for basic research, but pharmaceutical companies really bear 99% of the risk and complexity of bringing a drug to market. It's not all that expensive to find molecules that might do something useful, it's obscenely expensive and risky to prove one does something useful.
>There should be a method + requirement to pay royalties back to public funding for basic research,
You mean the patent system? The university of california holds patents on CRISPR, for instance.
CRISPR was obviously commercializable, most academic research is quite a bit further from commercialization and some tiny portion ends up being extremely valuable way downstream nonetheless.