Everything I hate about modern society all rolled into one tiny ball of rage-inducing selfish bullstuff
tl;dr of the OP article:
This virus forces cancerous cells to kill themselves off. It's an adenovirus, which is totally safe - without some special engineering the human immune system would kill it before it even started working. With a million pounds of funding, it could be put through phase I and II clinical trials, leaving only phase III trials before it could be put into production.
The catch is that million pounds - despite being a tiny sum for the potential gains (he notes that Madonna makes more than that in ten days in the article) it's hard to acquire that funding. Since the results have been published in medical journals already, it can't be patented and as such no monopoly can be held over it so nobody wants to invest at this early stage. It's too shaky financially - if it doesn't work out in the trials, they get nothing, basically. And naturally nobody thinks "What if it does work" - it's all about the bottom line. Ironic that a pharmaceutical company wouldn't care about helping people.
Plus, this is the same type of cancer that killed Steve Jobs. How many times over could that be funded with a week's worth of Apple's profits? (Oh right, they couldn't patent it - Apple wouldn't touch that stuff)
Even if this doesn't work, it's a mistake that can be learned from. It's another step. Christ, if I had the money to fund it I'd be negotiating the transfer instead of typing this. Thousands of people do have that kind of money, though. Something like this shouldn't be having trouble just because of a lack of a loving patent. With the amount of people killed - and the resultant amount of people hurt - by cancer, this shouldn't even be a question of money.
iMad.
