
How Much Money Did Jonas Salk Forfeit By Not Patenting The Polio Vaccine? - adventured
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/08/09/how-much-money-did-jonas-salk-potentially-forfeit-by-not-patenting-the-polio-vaccine/
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noonespecial
That's not the right question. The right question is how many more people
would have died if he had.

Note that the patent system did exist and he _chose_ not to use it, so murky
questions of incentivization should that system exist or not exist needn't be
raised. He just chose not to enrich himself so that more people could live.
10,000 Nathan Myhrvold's couldn't fill one of this guy's shoes.

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zecho
Imagine a disease in the modern world today that primarily affects young
children and causes parents to bleach the streets and sidewalks. Local
officials quarantine blocks of neighborhoods when someone is found with the
disease, because they don't know what else to do. Now imagine someone was
selling a cure at the time. There would be riots, the seller would be strung
up, and his drugs/methods would be copied.

I think we have great difficulty today understanding what life was like in
parts of America with epidemic breaks before there was a vaccine for polio.
There were children in iron lungs for weeks.

I can't imagine anyone developing a vaccine or a cure for something like that
and not simply giving it away. The breakthrough with polio doesn't compare to
anything else in patentable medicine. Salk's work stands alone.

~~~
noonespecial
You don't need to imagine.

[http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iRLtCGzuK...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iRLtCGzuKohsD6bYlE56DvjamAhQ?docId=CNG.e375a60f2aecd194939d36a71b212ed1.91)

The lives I'm thinking of weren't just Americans.

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jostmey
By not patenting the vaccine, not only did he save lives by providing
affordable medicine, but he allowed others to immediately build off of his
work.

How many people can claim to have (mostly) freed humanity from a diseases?
Think about that. Think about all the pain and suffering that never was.

~~~
bbgm
Especially given that where it made the most difference was in third world
countries. If cost had become an issue, this would not have been the case.

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ibudiallo
That's a good question for his financial gain. But how about this one :

How many lives did Jonas Salk saved by not patenting the polio vaccine?

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dnautics
I think it's also a question of: How much money did Jonas Salk gain by not
patenting the polio vaccine?

Not to criticize the article, but the implicit assumption is that he would
have gotten all of the royalties. But would he have gotten as much scientific
credibility in the long run? Would Sabin's vaccine been used exclusively and
Salk's vaccine descended into obscurity? How would these consequences have
translated into financial gain?

~~~
maaaats
Yeah, if the vaccine was more expensive, would it have been used as much? The
calculations here seem a bit like the movie industry, where each download is a
lost sale.

But not to take anything away from him. What he did was great, and he probably
would have been rich by patenting it. Just not $7bn rich.

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vacri
The original title had 'money' in it, which is less controversial. The current
link title just says 'how much...', no mention of money. This turns it into a
philosophical question - lose out on money, gain on moral integrity and
altruism.

~~~
dnautics
Uh, it's not like Jonas Salk wound up penniless, either; I'd say he got to
have a bigger impact on science than most people who do go the patenting
route; hell, there's a research institute that was founded in his name.

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wslh
It would be interesting to make a list of other "open source scientists".

I contribute with one: Cesar Milstein
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Milstein](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Milstein)
for more information read specifically "A missed opportunity? The patent saga"
[http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/exhibitions/milstein/pate...](http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/exhibitions/milstein/patents)

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dkuntz2
Calling them Public Domain Scientists would be more accurate...

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wslh
Yes, I agree.

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dkuntz2
Awesome! Resolution passed.

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delinka
noonespecial nailed this one. But allow me to suggest that others who would
consider the route of patenting such a necessary invention that they should
probably pick a reasonable licensing fee for their work. Why not license your
invention for pennies on the copy/individual use? Competitors can compete on
price, people can still afford it, and you can still obtain the benefits of
your cunning.

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sitharus
Well, that's an interesting question. Much like music, uptake is strongly
dependant on price and it's a fallacy to infer that the quantity consumed
would be equal if the cost changed.

If there was a higher price due to patents I wouldn't expect so much of the
third world to be immunised, as a lot of those countries depended on aid to
distribute the vaccine. I'd also expect first world countries without
socialised healthcare to have more non-immunised people.

Also many. It's many dollars. </pedant>

~~~
gabriel34
Yes, but in this case there is another factor still to consider:

Had he patented the vaccine, the disease would most likely still be endemic,
and the immunizations still be sold. How much is that worth?

One could speculate on some factors such as population, uncertainties of the
future worldwide validity of the patent (e.g.: How long would the market
reserve last) and regulation changes, but the present(past) value of a patent
is hard to determine, specially if the world we know doesn't have it.

Also, I don't know what OP meant, but I read 'How much money', not dollars

~~~
noonespecial
I have an even deeper factor. With that vaccine restricted, how much poorer
would the world be? What advances would not have occurred? What would all of
that "wealth" really be worth? What good is being "rich"(1) in a world of
poverty?

(1)25 years ago not even the richest men in the world had HD tv. Even if one
could focus his wealth to create one for himself, it would have been nearly
useless. I'd rather be a poor man in a rich world than a rich man in a poor
one.

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LarryMade2
I think a good counter question would be, how many lives have been lost from
companies patenting vital medicines thereby reducing the potential
availability of such things?

Parents are all well and good unless people die solely because of them.

~~~
maaaats
Unfortunately, patents may be a "necessary evil". Without the prospect of
making money, or at least cover the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to
test a new medicine, the risk would be to big.

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gabriel34
He didn't patent it because he valued less the money he would make than the
lives he would save and, probably to some lesser extent, the glory he would
get and the impact he would make in the world (all this were only potentials
at the moment of the decision).That not to mention his moral guidelines.
Patents exist to incentive innovation through a guarantee of returns over the
investment. By not patenting he is declaring that, to him, the returns (not
only financial) would be negative on the whole, and that he didn't need the
patent system to have a drive to innovate.

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lukeqsee
Nothing. A life saved is worth eminently more than a dollar earned.

~~~
corin_
I'd love to see some data on how many people draw the line where on that. $1
for a life, sure you save the life. $10? Life. $1m? $1b? Or $1b for 1000
lives? I'm sure not everyone would state that X lives is always worth more
than Y dollars for all values of X and Y.

~~~
rdl
In a lot of contexts, lives saved (in the US) are valued at $1-10mm. This is
based on life insurance premiums for higher risk jobs, availability of
marginal life savings for costs in other contexts, etc. Not sure how it
applies outside the US.

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corin_
Interesting, thanks - though that's insurance, not necessarily the same as
what people value

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rdl
It's not just insurance -- it's that we could save a life for $2.49 million in
traffic engineering, and tend to do so, but don't for, say, $20mm. It's
irrational to spend $20mm to save 1 person from super-rare-expensive-thing but
not to spend $2.49mm to save an equivalent person from less-expensive-thing.

The complication is that not all lives are valued the same, and certainly not
valued the same by everyone. We spend tens of _billions_ per year to protect
the President, which isn't just about his life but about the cost to the
economy (and nation in general) if anything happens to him. We probably could
save a kid in the ghetto for $50k in job training and mentorship, rather than
having him kill someone and/or get killed himself.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life)
is an introduction. It's a pretty fascinating concept.

~~~
corin_
So what about when we don't know how to value the life in question, you just
know that it's a person who will stay alive if you chose, or die if you take
$x - I don't know what my own decision would be, yet alone an average
decision.

It's one of those odd situations that I think gets a different answer
depending on what responsibility you feel. If the entirety of my wealth is
$2.5m I don't think I would spend it to save the life of somebody I don't
know. But would I go out and murder someone for that money? I don't think so..
and hope not. Both of the same are, I think, true for $100k.

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analog31
Maybe he didn't think it was patentable.

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Natsu
I remember him being quoted saying it was to save lives and I give him a lot
of credit for that.

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chmike
Polio Vaccine and AIDS... [1]

[1]([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPV_AIDS_hypothesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPV_AIDS_hypothesis))

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tensor
The very wiki page you cite notes that this has been disproven and links
several sources.

