You guys go on and on about how the private sector is raping this, that or the other thing and is basically evil incarnate with no basis in reality. And then when the shoe is on the other foot and it's at least a possibility that things could go horribly, horribly wrong you laugh and point fingers. This confuses me greatly and troubles more than a little.
Public research will reduce costs of end products, make them accessible to wider target group and improve competition between multiple companies, as opposed to a situation where one company had done all the research privately, patented all research results and then demanded royalties for any company who would want to enter competition on that particular field and develope products based on such research. That only benefits the single company's shareholders, it makes the end product more expensive, and reduces the fairness of the competition.
In addition it's ridiculous what sort of things are "patented" on continuous basis.
As an example, patenting entire genomes or their parts is just as silly as if Enrico Fermi had patented fission reaction.
As far as I'm concerned, nothing that appears in the nature should be possible to "patent". Transgenetic plants are a good example - typically, genes aren't made from scratch. Grossly simplified, if you want a cold-resistant, high-yield type of the plant, you look at what parts of the genome make the cold-resistant variant cold-resistant, extract those, insert them into a high-yield cultivar's genome and hope that the hack-slash job you made plays nicely together with parts of itself. When you're done, you should have a high-yield cultivar with increased resistance to cold (or diseases or whatever).
But you did not do the work of evolution - you looked at the genes for cold resistance, took them from the cold-resistant cultivar's genome and transplated them into the high-yield cultivar's genome.
Because you didn't manually encode the DNA strings, you don't really have any right to patent the resulting genome. Sure, you can patent the specific way you did it and you can define a price for the end product, but you shouldn't be able to prevent someone else from doing the same thing.
If you want, you can keep the research results secret, but patenting something like this is ludicrous. Let's say someone else does the same research and comes to same conclusions, and does a similar or same gene transplantation. But if someone else did the research first and patented it, they would have no right to sell the end product because it would infringe on the patented genome of the cold-resistand high-yield cultivar.
This kind of things could be averted if basic research and resulting knowledge were mainly done via public funding. Private companies then could each access the knowledge and use it for their own developement, which they could of course patent within reasonable limits.
Oh and I realize that the patent issues of transgenetic plants has little in common with stem cell research - superficially. But the underlying issues are still the same.
I could see a case where a privately funded research figures how to create, say, embryonic stem cell line that produces widely compatible transplant organs, but would then proceed to patent said line of cells, which would severely reduce the actual usefulness of said discovery, for the monetary gain of rather narrow group of people.
