There's a huge gap between the scientific breakthrough and the work needed to create a safe and effective therapy. It's not academically interesting, and academic scientists won't do it. It's optimization, not discovery. And what about the cost of the clinical trial, which could be $500m?

Government funded research institutions will continue to provide BREAKTHROUGHS to receive funding.

> And what about the cost of the clinical trial, which could be $500m?

That's an interesting one, because that cost is entirely caused by the government. The government could for example fund clinical trials, since they're the ones who are interested in it's results (as is by extension the public).

As for the rest, if the science were freely available without a patent from the scientists, companies could still spend money making it a therapy and making a profit by doing it better and more efficiently than their competitors, and they could still get a patent on their work.

We're talking about making the science patent free, not the product.

It's an interesting distinction here. I would argue that the science is already free. The Cas9 protein is a natural product. The guide RNA can be synthesized easily. What is being patented here is use of Cas9/CRISPR to edit human cells. In a general sense that is actually the product, and not merely "the science." In other cases, where the Cas9 protein is engineered to achieve things like lower off-target cutting rate, that is a pretty classical case of human invention.

Exactly. An evaluation of the efficiency of "buying" clinical trials with patents would be very interesting.

That's a very cynical and inaccurate appraisal of "The Time Before Patents."

Most scientific breakthroughs throughout history were pursued due to simple curiosity or necessity, precisely because without an international framework of patent law "patents" and the pursuit of technology as intellectual property directly for financial gain was impossible.

The British for example attempted to control physical access to textile IP but Samuel Slater[1] memorized as much as he could and "exported it" along with himself to the Americas to reap a fortune.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater

What if someone want to cure a disease that the government doesn't care about?