Talk:Bayh–Dole Act/Archives/2013

Criticism

This is written entirely as a legal issue, without regard to any of the social context.

Bayh-Dole is controversial in the medical and science literature. The opponents argue that the government takes research that was developed with public money and gives it to private entities, without any compensation or control.

Drugs that were developed with publicly-funded research are given to pharmaceutical companies that sell them for, for example, $200,000 a year, in the case of treatments for Gaucher's disease. For people over 65, Medicare pays for these drugs, so the taxpayers can pay billions of dollars for drugs that were developed with their own tax money.

Another good recent example is Myriad Genetics and its patents on the BRCA gene test for breast cancer. The BRCA1 gene was discovered by government-funded researchers, who filed patents and started Myriad Genetics. Myriad created a test, and charged $4,000 for a test, which many patients couldn't afford. Some labs could sequence an entire human genome for $4,000. Even worse, Myriad made it impossible to create a cheap (or affordable) panel of tests for common cancer genes and other genetic defects. Myriad was challenged in court and the Supreme Court invalidated their patent on June 2013 -- but in a patent case that didn't address the Baayh-Dole issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad_Genetics#Controversies

There have been several articles about this in the New England Journal of Medicine, some of which are free online at NEJM.org, and in Science magazine, among others. The next time I see a good article that summarizes the issues clearly, I'll add it to this entry. --Nbauman (talk) 01:57, 28 August 2013 (UTC)