>Without a system like that drugs like Lyrica wouldn't exist.

You don't know that for sure. On the other other hand we do know things, like without the open source ethic Wikipedia wouldn't exist.

Come on you can't compare web development to drug development. Ditto with the guy talking about polio. With the current regulatory landscape we need patent protection to incentivize anyone entering this industry. And even then you have CEOs of major biotech firms calling startups a delusional risk given the low probability of success.

Patenting is unneccessary. It also causes a lot of problems like siloization and reduplication of effort, which adds to the cost of drug R&D. The structure of the academic-science-industry complex has become so distorted that I'm not sure CEOs of biotech firms are the most competent people to be developing drugs. Ask any PhD (even those who are in the industry) about what they think of how pharma picks what to put into their pipelines, and you will nearly unanimously get a dispirited answer that is some combination of herd behavior, lack of creativity, legal departments, CYA, and just plain dumb business management.

An example: Pfizer closed down their Lansing michigan plant and wanted to force their employees to relocate to San Diego, without doing a real analysis of the decision, and on the eve of the move came to find out that the one person running their fermenter culture system didn't want to move - he wanted to raise his daughters on a farm and San Diego was too expensive for his pay grade. So they lost the ability to basically do every bioassay that they were doing in Lansing. Three years later, I had the opportunity to work next to the massive san diego pfizer campus. The facility was 2/3 empty and pfizer was struggling to find extra tenants and toying with a 'bio-incubator' idea.

http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn

I'm sure we could agree on how the system is fucked, but where is the alternative? Fact is, people in this thread who are railing against academics holding patents don't seem to get how the system is built in the first place. If they do, they should be proposing alternatives, not just scoring cheap political points against Big Pharma and Big Academia.

you don't need to 'propose alternatives'. You just do it. Make a drug. Don't patent it. Get it approved. Sell it. I mean, this is what I'm working on (see the damn link). Is that good enough?

I'm not super hopeful, but I will follow this with interest. Thanks and all the best.