Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 02:05:16 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, cjclark@alum.mit.edu, Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it>, "P. U. (Uli) Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <3BC560CC.265B97BC@mindspring.com> References: <20011010233539.G83192@lpt.ens.fr> <007f01c15220$a92e4ee0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <20011011095845.B475@lpt.ens.fr>
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Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > This happens fairly rarely. First, the small company should have the > resources for legal proceedings against the big company. These days, > whoever hires the bigger lawyer wins. Second, even when the small > company does do this, the "innovation" is considered pretty standard > by that time, so the sudden patent claims are not looked on very > kindly. You can actually get V.C. to get the lawyers to defend patents, these days... > On the other hand, self medication can be extremely dangerous. I'm > not a doctor, but I know plenty of doctors very well, and one of the > major problems they have is persuading patients that there's nothing > wrong with them (beyond perhaps bad food habits and lack of exercise, > or something like that). The patients insist on medication > (particularly if they're not highly educated) so the doctors end up > prescribing harmless placebos or vitamin B. But if you encourage > patients to start off making self-diagnoses: for every one case where > they're right, there will be 20 where they're hopelessly self-deluded, > and be a nuisance to both the doctor and the pharmacist. Luckily > pharmacies don't sell without prescriptions, but if the patient hops > from doctor to doctor until getting a prescription he/she likes (and > this is not difficult), there's not much that the pharmacy can do. Let me paraphrase a comedian's solution to nuclear waste: I think that this would put back a necessary evolutionary pressure that we've tried to legislate away: I have no problem with abject stupidity being fatal under some not so common corner cases. For everyone who self-medicates themselves to death, average human intelligence goes up. > You may think this is a necessary consequence of medicine being big > business, but I think it's a Bad Thing. There's a reason why medical > school takes 5 years or more. Frankly, I have self-prescribed a lot of treatment, and then had to go to a doctor, let them form their own opinion, and then let them prescribe the same thing I had written on a sticky note in my pocket. I don't suggest treatment for others, as it would be practicing medicine without a license, but I have offered the advice to see their doctor; among other things, I've diagnosed Asberger's Syndrome, Grave's Disease, diabetes myelitis, heavy metal poisoning, bacterial sinusitus, hepatic liver failure, and an atypical Pyogenic Granuloma, among other things. "Reading Is Fundamental". > > there's a reason your teachers hit you in the head with an > > eraser to wake you up in Biology class. > > Biology class is totally different from medical school. Most of us > did not go to medical school. And going to medical school does not convey omniscience or omnipotence... Frankly, if someone has live in their body for 30+ years, and a doctor examines them for 10 minutes, I'm probably going to bet that the doctor will know less about their condition than the person being examined, unless it's something blatant, like a broken arm or a cut, unless the person being examined is a blithely self-unaware idiot. > This is a stupid statement. Yes, overpopulation is bad, but the > diseases existed much before the overpopulation (in fact the > overpopulation is largely *because* of more effective control > of the less dangerous diseases, which has increased lifetimes). So access to improved medical care should have been linked to population controls? > Oh, yes, they did. And so did the western world. Check on the plague > in England, for example; but 100 years ago people were even dying of > influenza in the west. Today, we have an array of cancer treatments > which are still of no help if you were diagnosed just a bit too late. Yeah; this is because of the drug approval process being so involved and arcane, with the justification of "Thaladimide", which never made it to the U.S., even under grossly less restrictive standards for new drugs at the time. If you had malignant Melithisoma (lung cancer caused by asbestos), you would probably be a hell of a lot less understanding of the process and lobbying by other companies which has kept Onconase (a genetically engineered drug derived from the North American tree frog) and other drugs off the market. > We still don't have anything for malaria beyond quinine, Actually, we have a vaccine. > let alone some of the more obscure African diseases like ebola. Actually, it has been proven experimentally that blood transfusions from recovered Ebola victims to current victims successfully neutralize the virus, if the blood transfusion is given quickly enough after onset of the diesase process. I recommend reading the book "The Hot Zone". There is also a "Nova" episode which documents the recovery of a nurse after a transfusion from a recovered Ebola victim. > Everything looks easy after someone's done it. Future breakthroughs > will not come from refining the existing drugs and antibiotics, but > from some totally new approach like designing proteins/enzymes for > specific tasks, genetics, or something nobody has thought of. Such > work goes on mainly in universities, not in the pharmaceutical > laboratories. Actually, you should go to the IBM site and search for the term "blue gene". IBM is dedicating an incredible amount of resources to the protein folding problem, which is almost purely a computational problem at this point. > Funds are needed for medical research, but a new framework is needed > where those funds are used correctly, not on pandering to the phobias > of the rich while squeezing the poor. "He who pays the piper calls the tune". > Medicine should be part of the infrastructure of "public good", > like railways and post which have never been successfully privatised. ??? Most of the U.S. railway system has, and remains, privatized. FedEx has been explicitly prohibited from carring ordinary letters, since it was less expensive than the alternative, the government granted monopoly of the U.S. Postal Service. Care to try for a third example? 8-). > Instead, we today have instances of multinationals trying to > grab patents on the healing properties of things like turmeric, > which have been known for centuries among traditional communities. Not patentable: herbs can not be patented; this is why so much funded research ignores them entirely: no return on investment for investigating them. > Then the countries most affected by this have to go through > expensive and time-consuming litigation to try and overthrow > the patent. That's ridiculous. There are many classes of patents that are valid in the U.S. that the rest of the world either does not respect at all (e.g. software or gene patents), or ignores when they can turn a profit by undercutting the U.S. prices (e.g. the AIDS drugs sold to African countries by India and other countries, manufactured with cheaper labor than that available in the U.S.). Realize, also, that those countries have the same vested interest in finding treatment protocols which never actually cure the disease, that the U.S. is claimed to have. > Patents were meant for the public good, not for the benefit > of the multinationals or even the inventors individually; > this system falls far short. "To promote progress in the sciences and useful arts...". -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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