Comment by photochemsyn

Bayh-Dole legislation in the 1990s allowed universities to exclusively license researcher inventions to private parties. Hence:

> "Celgene had acquired the rights to thalidomide patents held by researchers at Rockefeller University in 1992."

Change Bayh-Dole law to non-exclusive licensing, but with some level of royalties paid to institution that originated the patent, and other corporations could have made the drug - and it would be a competitive market, so costs would drop due to lack of a monopoly on the drug.

This one simple change to Bayh-Dole - 'non-exclusive' - would upset the academic-corporate apple cart well beyond pharmaceuticals. Eg the PageRank algorithm created at Stanford could not have been exclusive licensed to Google - any American corporation or person could have applied for a license to the invention, entirely erasing the benefits of a monopolistic patent to the corporation.

One great benefit of this change is that corporations who wanted exclusive patents would have to finance their own private R & D divisions, instead of just capturing the output of taxpayer-financed researchers.