I think patents are just a poor way to fund this stuff in general. Better to do drug bounties in which case the financing trickiness is only about who funds the human trials.

In more than medicine, there's a good argument that only monopolies can afford R&D (c.f. Bell Labs) and monopolies are also terrible, so I'm pretty down on leaving R&D to the private sector anyways. Remember we already publicly fund all the R, this just about the D.

Also, ownership, and IP ownership in general, far from being the natural order of things, is an extremely weird and hard to price financial instrument. I don't see the point of forcing it, and trying to make it work with e.g. adjustable patent lengths. That just feels like an epicycle that's very prone to regulatory capture.