A billion pounds?

[ciphergoth]

babysimon: "You could do a lot of good with £1bn"

How would you spend a billion pounds in order to do good? You can't spend it on yourself or your friends.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Entrusted? Who's entrusting anyone?

Or to put it another way - anyone can research anything they like. But they'll find it costs them a lot of money to pay for materials, researchers, permits, testing, etc. If you want anyone to invest money in those areas then you have to make it worth their while. After all, they might invest a lot of money and not find anything at all.

The alternative method is for the government to employ a lot of researchers, but generally speaking it's turned out to be more productive to let other people take the risk, letting them head off to work in thousands of areas (rather than exerting a top down control over where they should work) and letting them get on with it.

Drug patents don't actually last very long - 20 years. After which point anyone can make use of that research to make their own generic copies of the drugs.

[figg.livejournal.com]

Not to be a cynic, but copyright only used to last 15 years.

Now it is 75 and counting.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. And I think that's very, very wrong. (Having exactly that conversation on a different journal right now).