It's difficult for me to say this, but despite your claims of working in labs, I believe you have been fully brainwashed.

"The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing.

Most of this marketing money is directed at the physicians who do the prescribing, rather than consumers. As Oliver pointed out, drug companies spent more than $3 billion a year marketing to consumers in the U.S. in 2012, but an estimated $24 billion marketing directly to health care professionals."

The above is a direct quote from source 2 of my previous comment.

Why do you claim there is "so much wrong with my sentence", and then come with "biology is complex"? Yes, I understand that it is complex, and that the work can be unrewarding as we fail our way forwards, towards a new discovery.

This is why it is better to do this work in public and work together cooperatively, and not to have perverse incentives to privatize research and advancements [1][2]. Today the health and wellbeing of the American public is often hindered and held back by patents and IP. Private R&D is crap, and public funding gets an insanely bad wrap in the USA.

Again, as was my concern with the OP, where are your sources/research? Are you really claiming that academic paywalls and the perverse incentives mentioned above are the sustainable way forward?

I appreciate your work if it is true that you worked in labs, but I disagree with your economic argument.

The consumer money thrown at corporations in the form of rent on corporate IP (pharmaceutical products) [3], could instead be spent by the government on more public research and development.

I think the real question underlying all this is: are you allergic to tax and government? Maybe you prefer the term crowdfunding instead of tax? That term works for me too if it gets the message across. Maybe we can also use the word intrapreneur instead of public servant? With our new words, the question I am interested in is: is it proven fact that pharmaceutical development is better off being crowdfunded by 330 million Americans (or instead of 'Americans' we can call them 'investors’?)[4]?

Please could you tell me if you actually read the article attached to this thread? It has pretty much the same arguments that I laid out about above. Please tell me if I am misrepresenting something.

The reason I am reacting strongly and pushing back on your tiresome argument is because the US seems to be the only industrialized country where people die because they cannot afford their prescription drugs, because of extortionate corporate prices, while other countries don't have this [5][6]. I'm trying to understand what underlying ideology makes these ludicrous policies and systems possible.

Why not innovate on sustainable business models and partnerships, instead of focusing on better IP protections and other rent-seeking apparatus?

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/barriers-t...

[2] https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...

[3][4] "A tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created
...
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks
...
Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks ... Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States" https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he...

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/oct/26/michaelmoore.do...