It's a legitimate question. The article is about gene theraphy, and its potential to cure chronic genetic diseases.
If you create a startup that after a decade creates an affordable and effective gene theraphy for type II diabetes, and most of people recover, will your startup survive curing only new cases of it? Will it be able to tackle another disease before your coffers dry up?
The question can be viewed as greedy companies wanting to milk diseases forever, or as a sustainability issue. Being able to cure chronic diseases affordably will probably become a new socioeconomic challenge.
FMT was the topic of my dissertation. Donor stool is heavily screened, and there's pushes both to use the patient's own stool where possible, or creating synthetic stool that is pathogen free.
Here's hoping that someday someone who cares more about promoting health than padding wallets will take this idea and use it to bring the masses something they can apply once at a low price.
Unfortunately, states these days rarely do anything on their own. So even if they bought or took the IP, they'd still have to lend it to some private manufacturer, who will quickly ensure the government itself ends up locked into a subscription. Either way, some private company gets fat, and society gets shafted: you'll be paying a subscription for this, whether directly to a vendor, or hidden as part of your taxes.
Like usual, the problem isn't whose name is on the box. The problem is the subscription-based business model, which can easily turn into pure rent seeking.
Why purchase the IP at all? The proposed funding is for parallel reconstruction - we know it's possible, we have enough details to recreate it, it's a "simple matter of funding" at that point.
While there is some work and capital that goes in to developing the IP, it also builds up on decades of fundamental research that is funded by the public (standing on the shoulders of giants and all that). Therefore, I'd say that a big discount should be had for such a purchase.
The government is protecting their discovery via patent law, why is it not allowed to remove this protection.
Patents and copyright are very recent inventions. Not everyone is motivated by profit. People were inventing things before capitalism consumed the world.
it's paid propaganda (paid meaning tax credits and gatekept access to financing, distribution). hollywood movies exist for shareholder profit, making money for changes like this easily accepted and even incentivized. see also the changes they routinely make to meet complex rules around including enough british actors for lucrative british tax credits, and extrapolate more globally.
the defense against this in this thread can be summarized as "it doesn't matter" or "it's not that much" while it is what's happening
I don't mean to contradict you, your comment just made a good opening to post the world map from the movie. The map is really (really…) not detailed, and honestly I find it hard to identify the problem border in it off the coast of "Asia".
Somebody on Twitter pointed out the sea border around Greenland is controversial as well, something about fishing rights.
what hollywood does for US imperialism is also shameful and obfuscated. studios work closely with military and CIA and no it is not disclosed as propaganda.
spark is far more testable and composable than sql! and you even get static typing checking. plus i can read data from anywhere - local fs, s3, rdbms, json, parquet, csv... rdbms could not compete
I cannot agree more. There is way too much B.S. in the field of software and it's a joke that we get away with calling ourselves "software engineers" or "computer scientists" for how little analytical decision making or scientific method applies.
