Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 01:05:53 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Returned mail: see transcript for details Message-ID: <20011013010553.A343@lpt.ens.fr>
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> Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > > IBM is doing that for computer/technology reasons, not for medical > > research. All leading-edge companies do it, to show what they're > > capable of; IBM's last effort was a chess-playing machine which has no > > conceivable commercial or social benefit. If Blue Gene actually > > recovers an enzyme structure which would be useful medically, I doubt > > IBM would get the patent for it, but you know more than me about that, > > I'm sure. > > The commercial reason is that the protein folding problem is > the number one problem facing medicine at this point, and it > has broad applicatoin, if cracked. The application would be > to create any protein you want to create, at a greatly reduced > cost. Do not think that there will not be money in it for > whoever cracks the problem. I know a fair bit about the protein folding problem, including the fact that it's not as simple as you think (or as many naive physicists think). There will certainly be money in it, but I doubt the money will go to IBM simply for supplying the computer, any more than money for solving existing computational problems goes to the computer manufacturers. Moreover, the protein folding problem is much more than a computational problem. In its stripped down form, it is often stated as "mapping a protein sequence to its fold", and then it is imagined that doing a molecular dynamics simulation of the protein chain will be able to predict its fold, if carried out long enough. But real life is not that simple; proteins in nature don't fold like that, but are created and folded under very different circumstances. (Yes, I know, the people who will be using IBM's computer don't believe it's that simple either. But the complexities are basically biochemical, rather than computational, and IBM will really have little to do with solving those problems. This is all rather offtopic here, though.) > I think you are mixing passenger railway with freight railway, Well, yes, when referring to public services which are not successfully privatised, I was talking about passenger railway. > and concluding because people don't like passenger rail service > in the U.S. more than they like getting there quickly by plane, > or having daily control over their own schedules (how many dates > would you be able to have on the spur of the moment, if you were > required to take a relatively slow train home before you could > get in your car and drive to the date location?) Train travel is, of course, suitable only to some ranges of distances. One would not expect to travel from New York to Los Angeles by train. However, Los Angeles to San Francisco should certainly be possible, and a train travel between two such major cities separated by such a difference in France (say, Paris to Marseille) would take 3 or 4 hours, and there are several trains a day. For LA-SF, you can easily look at the amtrak site and find you can't do it without changing, taking bus connections, etc and spending over 8 hours. (I know that example because I needed to do that recently; but I've been told that it's the same, or worse, all over the US. It's a bit better on the east coast in the Washington-New York-Boston zone, I admit; but still doesn't approach the efficiency of the SNCF in France. (Since the faster Paris-Marseille track opened a few months ago, air tickets on that route are going unsold, while the train, which runs several times a day, is booked out well in advance.) As for my other example, India -- trains on short distance scales are very frequent too, and if they're not always comfortable and not as fast as the SNCF, at least they're extremely cheap. (The higher-class fares from Bangalore to Madras, a distance of around 370 km I think, covered in 4.5 hours to 7 hours depending on the train chosen, are $10 or less. The lower class fares reserved are around $3. The unreserved fares are, I think, $2 or so. There is one fast day train, two medium-fast day trains, and one slow night train every day; in fact there are other trains too but these are not commonly used to travel the full distance.) Shorter distances, say Bombay-Pune or Bangalore-Mysore (around 150 km), are much more frequent. So, in answer to your question: yes, you can decide these things on the spur of the moment, both in India and in France, the only two countries I have spent significant time in. If you can't in the US, that's a problem with the US. > It's not surprising to me that FedEx and DHL, whose main > claim to market share in India is that they are able to send > and deliver internationally, would be more expensive. How about France, where also they are more expensive? Besides, I was referring to delivery prices within India (strictly speaking, I was referring to a francisee of FedEx called Blue Dart, and a franchisee of DHL whose name I forget). > > In France, too, FedEx and other couriers are more expensive > > than the French post's "Chronopost". Ordinary letters within > > France cost three francs, or around 40 cents; I doubt any > > courier company could approach that price point. > > You're wrong. If the postal system were not a state monopoly > in most countries, it would be easy to compete on purely > economic terms, using more modern automation than that used > by them. The cost isn't the "automation" in sorting and so on; it's in delivery at the doorstep of the recipient. Postal departments everywhere have a reach which extends to the remotest villages, because governments have supplied such links as parts of basic infrastructure. Couriers will not find it cost-effective to make door-to-door delivery of ordinary letters at such rates (40 cents in France, 4 cents in India, whatever). In fact I know the Indian rates are subsidised and not profitable; the postal department tries to recover the cost from things like courier services. For the same reason, private transport operators tend not to serve remote low-populated areas, and it is often left to government-run transport to serve those markets; these routes are not profitable for the government either, but they cross-subsidise them from other routes or other income sources. > > The turmeric patents were rejected, but only after protracted > > litigation, which most developing countries can ill afford. Other > > patents still exist. > > Developing countries can (and do) simply ignore patents. > > This seems to be an issue that's really a problem with the > WTO, and with India's system, in particular. The U.S. > patent office actually worked: it rejected the patent. For turmeric, and after representation from India. Not for neem (margosa, I think, in English) and other herbal products, so far. Those patents still exist. > While I agree that there are assinine abuses of the U.S. > patent system, this case was clearly an attempt by people > who knew something as a result of regional common knowledge > trying to cash in on that knowledge, to the detriment of > everyone else. Sure. The point is it's rather frequent. India is not the only country affected. And you claimed it's not possible to do this, which is not true. > > > > 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. > > > > See the above links, again. For more links, just do a search on > > google, for example, for "turmeric patent" or "neem patent". > > It's ridiculous in that countries do not have to overthrow > such patents, not because of the process involved in doing > that. They most certainly do have to overthrow them, at some point, if they want an open market for export of these products, which they do rather actively. Otherwise they'd be violating a patent. Perhaps you're arguing that they can ignore them and pretend the patent doesn't exist, and the multinational who got the patent won't sue. I don't see that happening, and it's probably cheaper to overthrow the thing to begin with than to sit and wait for a patent-infringement lawsuit and then tackle that. > > Realize, also, that your knowledge of "those countries" is extremely > > limited and gleaned from a very selective reading. > > I have averaged a book a day for the last 30 years; I rather > doubt my reading is as selective as yours. > > In any case, I was referring to the financial interest of the > countries, like the U.S. and India, which stand to make a > much larger amount of money from AIDS treatments than they > would, were they to actually cure the disease. I can't really say about the US, but India and other developing countries are certainly not making any money from AIDS treatments. > India did not approach AIDS drug shipments to Africa as the > purely humanitarian endeavor that they claimed: Ah now you're referring to a specific Bombay-based pharmaceutical company, Cipla, as "India". I could equally well refer to Monsanto as "The US". That's just silly. By "India" one can mean, most restrictively, the Indian government, but preferably a broader index like the GDP. To claim that India would make a gain, one would have to show that Cipla's gains were offset by the huge costs of government-sponsored AIDS treatment within India itself. R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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