I did misread your statement. I interpreted "a contribution has been made, and what that contribution consists of" as "a contribution by specific people" not "a contribution to humanity." I apologize.

However, that does not change the overall intent of my reply, which is that drug discovery is not so clear-cut as you make it out to be.

Take "A previously unknown molecule had been synthesized". Part of drug development includes finding previously known molecules which have new and unexpected actions. Again I point out sildenafil, which was synthesized for use in hypertension and angina pectoris. It was a nurse, during phase I trials, who discovered that was an effective against erectile dysfunction.

As another example, insulin is found in the body. It was first synthesized in the 1960s, but diabetics had to use insulin from animal sources, which was expensive and hard to acquire. Genentech, in 1982, started selling insulin made using E. coli genetically modified with human DNA. Now insulin is relatively inexpensive.

Insulin was not new. The medical use of the chemical was not new. But the method of creating the chemical was new, and for that Genentech received a patent, and a lot of money. This case does not fit your description of how the drug discovery market.

Then there's combination therapies, where the use of two different and already existing drugs has a synergistic effect. Here's a list of some combination therapies which were patented in 2011: http://sciclips.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/recent-combination-... . Again, these are known chemical compounds, while you've twice asserted that the chemicals has to be "previously unknown" in order to be patented.

To summarize: getting a drug patent does not mean that the chemical has never been seen before.

Then again, your thesis doesn't require that it be unique. You point to drug patents because you believe they must have an "objective evidence of nonobviousness", and you want patents to have the same requirement.

However, that non-obviousness criterion is already required to get a patent. Quoting from Wikipedia: "In modern usage, the term patent usually refers to the right granted to anyone who invents any new, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter."

It looks like you want patents to have an additional burden of proof of non-obviousness. For example, "publication in a peer-reviewed journal or conference proceedings" may count. However, you don't realize how easy that is to achieve. Peer review is a relatively low bar. There are any number of so-called 'predatory journals' which are advertised as peer-review, and which take your money and publish, but which don't have an meaningful peer-review system. Someone who pays $10,000 to get a patent will not find it difficult to spend another $1,000 to publish in one of these journals.

It's trivial to start a new academic journal, and have it staffed by friends of yours. In that way, everyone can published peer-reviewed literature. And "conference proceedings"? That's an almost trivial bar.

Your proposal is so easily gamed as to be worthless. How much do you know about the patent system? How much do you know about drug development?