You objection to "patenting life" seems utterly spurious and would effectively end GMO seeds (as the effort expended creating them could not be recouped.) But perhaps that's your ulterior motive. I see no legitimate motivation for your position.
Discovery isn't. Look at all the RCs and other designer drugs around, or Shulgin. I could pull a shit out of my ass and probably find a microbe with something noteworthy in it.
A lot of this shit just happens by accident. LSD, Viagra, Penicillin off the top of my head. All had huge impacts too.
It's everything post, and a bunch of overpaid jackoffs and hullabaloo. You're not going to take an RC with an open license to market because there's a billion dollars in intermediary steps between finding it and proving it's safe and effective.
Am I though, or am I just looking arbitrary restrictions put in place by various governments either directly or indirectly curbing deliverable drugs? Oh and pharma's shitty business practices.
I don't think it's fair to call it economics when all the costs are derived from legal fictions and stakeholder disinterest.
Yes, drug discovery can become much easier if you don't have to show the drugs work and are safe. Any old chemical can be called a drug in that case; you don't even have to laboriously search through the exponentially vast space of possible chemicals for the winners.
Yeah I guess we ahould go from one extreme to the other and totally forget all the biochemistry and public knowledge of drugs we've accumulated in the last 100 years.
As to working the baseline efficacy benchmark is 30%. Not really a stunning number considering it has already been selected as a remedy for something specific at that point. Curatives aren't marketable when profit motive of stakeholders is involved.
Big pharma peddles snake oil, too, by the way. Serotonin theory is becoming increasingly unpopular and SSRIs are looking increasingly dangerous as a clinical proposition, and they're frequently misused in clinical settings. Despite all of that they're taken by 13% of Americans, and the trend points towards an increasing number. Lest we forget: the pretension of safety Pharma acts under has been dangerous in many instances.
There's plenty of ethnogenic compounds that smack against your theory, too, by the way. In any case, to my knowledge, most of these "drugs" are derivative from known-active compounds, altered then patented (sometimes finding better therapeutic doses, lower toxicity, better dose response). At this point the laborious search is relatively smaller. Not to mention it's currently being offset to molecular dynamics which allows us to engineer hypothetical molecules against simulated proteins including those that are dysfunctional as well as model pathways for synthesis.
We should not allow patenting of genomes/genes. Full stop. We should rely on those other systems of breeder's rights.