RQ, going back to the Abagail story. If I remember right, someone was trying to give Germany all the credit for the innovation of that. I'm reading that it is a more advanced version of a artificial heart invented here in the US and perfected here in TGS of Texas:
Just keepin ya'll honest
Not being dishonest. There are many different types of artificial heart, and the original design has been modified and improved on in many ways. Just because the automobile was originally invented in the USA (no idea if it was, actually!), doesn't mean that no other country is due any credit for advances in automobile technology.
The point about it being the "Berlin heart" that Abigail got was a response to your suggestion that countries with universal healthcare systems don't innovate in healthcare technology.
This artificial heart was just a handy example to demonstrate that they do.
Did you look at
the web site of the Wellcome Trust that I linked to earlier? This is a
British charitable foundation.
The world's largest medical research charity funding research into human and animal health.
Have a look round that site,
see what they do. This bunch are probably the largest source of funding for medical research in Britain, and they have a high international profile too. They have
absolutely bugger-all to do with the government.
There is a
government supported research council too, and quite right, the government should bloody well pitch in, but it's only part of the overall medical research scene in Britain. This is why Stossel was able to say that only a small fraction of medical research is government-funded. The vast bulk is funded by chartiable trusts (like Wellcome), and by pharmaceutical companies (you know, private capitalist outfits).
Stossel was dishonestly implying that in countries with universal healthcare systems, all the medical research in these countries is government-funded, and then pointing to the small fraction that actually is to suggest that such countries do not engage in medical research to a significant degree. Well, of course that's simply not true. The existence of universal healthcare provision doesn't for a second imply that the government takes over medical research. It's got nothing to do with it. The government remains a part of an overall research effort that is largely non-government-funded.
Now, talking of keeping people honest, why do you think that Stossel (implicitly) lied about this?
A little bit more about Wellcome. This lot have more money than God. They are responsible for the fact that the human genome is a free-access public good, and was not patented for profit.
(Sorry, doing this from memory, source is a book called "Backroom Boys" by Francis Spufford.) In the 1990s there was a public project to sequence the human genome and make the results freely available to any researchers, with the aim of the advancement of science. It had wide support and was generally agreed to be a Good Thing. However, one or a small group of US researchers decided to rock the boat and hijack the effort for their own profit.
They announced that they had funding to buy a lot of equipment, and in addition they were going to skip a time-consuming but hitherto essential step in the process so that they could get results faster than the public project. And that they would patent the results and people who wanted access would have to pay.
The real killer here is that there is a law in the US which forbids the government from doing anything that competes with a private company. This still applies even if the government were doing it first. The result was that the US government was legally obliged to withdraw its funding for the public effort.
The private entrepreneurs behaved as if the US government contribution
was the entire public project, and started talking about the researchers in that sector moving over to sequence the mouse genome instead. They were confident that the US law meant that they had a completely free run.
They forgot that it was an international effort, and there were other countries conrtibuting.
The British researchers went to the Wellcome Trust, who were funding the British section of the project, and explained all. They were at first worried that Wellcome would simply see this as a reason to withdraw funding and allocate its money elsewhere. However, the Wellcome trustees got cross. They all went to a meeting in the US where all the talk was already about disappointed scientists having to switch to mouse research, and announced that they were going to
increase their funding to cover a much higher percentage of the total effort. They also made it clear that this was not a ceiling on their potential contribution, and that they were prepared to fund 100% of the public effort if need be. They would put the entire assets of the Trust behind it (capital of $25 billion was mentioned I think).
So the public effort speeded up, and stayed ahead of the private project, and managed to get enough of the genome into the public domain that the private company folded. Or that's how the story is told.
Google
The Human Genome Project and
Celera Corporation for more information.
Now there are two views which may be taken on this (or maybe more than two!). Maybe Venter was hard-done-by, and should have been left in peace to patent the human DNA sequence. Maybe (actually, not maybe, he
did) he spurred the public effort to move faster and complete the project earlier. Maybe it would be better if a private company had the patent on our genes and was able to profit from every research project that needs the information.
But whichever line you take, remember that the funding and the impetus for the ultimately successful public project came from Britain, and came from a completely private, non-government source, able to act without political or vested-interest interference.
In a country with one of the most centralised universal healthcare systems in the world.
Rolfe.
