detriment to the economic activity and exploitation is still in effect. Much more needs to be done to unravel the predicament Africa has found itself in as a result of the ills done hundreds of years ago. While international benefactors must be commended, we must all realise that to successfully aid a continent as large as Africa, we must start to take broader approaches. As a continent, Africa has no right in being the poorest in the world, it starts from what we do in this generation.
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Should we have patents on companies that threaten to hold monopoly, offer essential services or are critical for saving the planet? K ENZA W ILKS
The stifler of innovation itself, comes in reams of paper, hoarded in the unexplored depths of the US patent office. Previously heralded as the protector of innovation, has the time for patent passed? Dr Jonas Edward Salk was born the son of Jewish, Polish immigrants on the 28th of October, 1914. This man of humble, second generation immigrant origins, growing up in the Bronx would go on to dedicate his life to finding the cure for Polio and in 1955 find it and in doing so save the lives of thousands of people from the debilitating disease. Upon his discovery of a vaccine he was famously interviewed by the TV personality Ed Murrow and was asked on the show, “Who owns the patent”. The assumption made by Murrow was that Salk would be a fool to have not rushed to the patent office, discovery clutched firmly
in his fist, to register his creation. The race to the patent office constituted the modern equivalent to Archimedes leaping from the bathtub and streaking through the streets of Ancient Greece epitomised by the foot race to the U.S patent office between Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell in the fight over the telephone. Dr Salk potentially held a patent worth an estimated $7 billion had the vaccine been bottled exclusively, sold at a premium, at restricted supplies, by the milligram to the highest bidder (otherwise known as the most desperate mother). Instead his response was simple, “No one” he said “Could you patent the sun?”. Unfortunately, Dr Salk’s act of generosity and altruism is all too rare in the market for drug research and development. The use of patent and Intellectual property laws intended to protect small-scale investors have become dominated by corporate heavyweights like GlaxoSmithKline, patent trolls out to concoct lawsuits with the express goal of stifling innovation and corporations transfixed by profit margins and shareholder dividends. The current system for the allocation of patents creates a set of perverse incentives for a race to the patent office, not a race to the consumer market. But where is this most problematic? To be clear, I have little to no problem with the frivolous patent applications for inventions that most of us would rather never see progress beyond the prototype stage for instance a patent on an “apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force” which sounds more similar to a medieval torture tactic than a method to bring life into the world. Instead it is the use of patent law on particular goods and services that are significant merit goods boasting large-scale positive externalities, such as life-saving medicines like Salk’s polio vaccination or green technology that could revolutionise the fight against global warming.
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