Potential Cancer Cure - Unavailable!
The key sentences in Bill Sardi’s article on cancer treatments are:
Gc-MAF is a naturally made molecule and is not patentable, though its manufacturing process is patent protected. There is no evidence of any current effort to commercialize this therapy or put it into practice.
That’s why this will NEVER be available in the U.S. Nobody gets the high-margin-producing patent rights to the chemical itself, and the U.S. government’s guns protecting their “intellectual property,” if they sell a treatment containing bio-identical molecules.
That’s why there’s no effort to commercialize this treatment.
Government intervention pushes the profit incentive away from successful resolution of disease causes, and towards a path of maximizing the length of treatment, and the margins of the chemicals used for treatment. The same dynamic is at work in various other ways: “new and improved” drugs that really aren’t, from a patient’s perspective, but ARE subject to new patents, as opposed to the (now-generic) drugs they replaced; actions taken by the Feral Death Administration (FDA) against bio-identical hormones and compounding pharmacies, to force people into using patented artifical substitutes instead of natural estrogen, thyroid, etc.; and the use of psychotropic drugs to manage behavior.
Much of this is purely negative fallout from “intellectual property” laws that really don’t do jack shit to promote innovation, and aren’t necessary for the same. As an example of a field with the driving force behind the innovation cycle being a lack of “IP” laws, see financial derivatives.
The artificial protection of “IP” laws distorts the market’s natural incentives for innovation, making absolutely sure that what we get isn’t actually the innovation that market participants would be best served by, and introducing incentives for “mal-innovation.”
Post Script: this happens in every industry, not just pharma. There is probably not a single cleaning or disinfecting product in your home that you couldn’t replace with either plain soap, baking powder, chlorine or oxygen bleach, or vinegar. But where are the profit margins in selling those??? The profit margins in developing new, patentable, cleaning molecules and contraptions is high. Talcum powder is incredibly effective against fire ants, but low-margin compared to far more expensive, and less effective, bait poisons. On it goes …


June 4th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
[…] Posts like this are why Bill Rempel’s blog stays on my list of favorite market blogs, even though he doesn’t trade in any way like I do. […]
June 4th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
[…] the heels of yesterday’s mention of “intellectual property” (IP) laws and their flaws, comes this article in The Freeman titled “Hierarchy or the Market,” by Kevin Carson. […]