Más monopolios es menos salud. Las patentes sobre medicamentos están haciendo que la industria farmacéutica, en vez de desarrollar los medicamentos que necesitamos, gaste sumas millonarias en marketing, litigios, y lobbies.
Michael Heller, Nov. 2008
"So in the last 30 years we've had a steady increase, up and up and up, of money going in, tens of billions of dollars in research. But if you look at drugs coming out, the drugs that actually treat human disease, drugs that actually save lives, that line has gone steadily trending downwards. It used to be a fairly close line between R&D and products: as R&D went up, the amount of drugs that treated diseases went up. In the last 30 years we've had a boom on patenting on the basic precursors of drugs, and a steady decrease in the number of drugs that treat disease. It's a radical shift, it's the first time in our economy that's happening. And the reason for that gap is what I'm calling gridlock. We've now so many owners for the underlying inputs that you need for a product, that the produc itself no longer appears. The negotiations have become so complicated that the ultimate good doesn't ever emerge. So we have drugs that should exist, that could exist, that don't. That's patent gridlock."
Eben Moglen at Plone conference 2006; software and community in 21st century. Ver: Transcripción anotada.
"If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world, by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question of microeconomic theory, the moral question, "What should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing to provide it to them", has only one unique answer. There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay. Every death from too little bread under those circumstances is murder. We just don't know who to charge for the crime."
Marcia Angell @ Prescription Drugs:
"What the drug companies are doing now is concentrating on lifestyle drugs that can be marketed to vast numbers of people and the market, can be easily expanded. Let me give you an example. The top-selling drug in the world is Lipitor, Pfizer's Lipitor. This is a drug of the statin type, but it's a "me-too" drug. It's the 4 of 6 very similar statin drugs now on the market. Marketing goes mainly to convince people that one "me-too" drug is better than another, despite the lack of any evidence on that score. They've become vast marketing machines now, and if you could stop the "me-too" market, you would stop the promotional activies to a large extent."
Carlos Castillo — Investigador en el área de minería de datos y búsqueda, en la web y redes sociales. Doctor en ciencias de la computación, Universidad de Chile. Más información »Follow @ChaToX
La programación es una lucha incansable entre los programadores, creando nuevos programas más grandes y potentes y a prueba de idiotas, y el universo, creando cada vez más y mejores idiotas. De momento gana el universo.
— Frase extraída de un foro de Internet sobre programación
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