I got no idea whether or not you'll see this. Side effect of using individual archives as my primary archive type.

Derek, I do not believe academic labs produce drugs. But if a commercial entity did the work an academic lab did, they'd apply for a patent and get it. Take a look at how intellectual property works in any other field. People get patents for well defined but unimplemented ideas regularly And if you later independently define and implement that idea, well too bad you still owe royalties. I suspect government funding of the research is the reason more of these compounds aren't patented by academic labs in the first place.

Look at Coca-Cola and Amazon.com and you'll see the law covering trade secrets and process patents gives as much protection and they currently have…the makers of Prilosec might argue Coca-Cola's protection is stronger. A competitor would have to develop an in dependant process to produce any drug under consideration and so no one gets a free ride. The drug being in the public domain would be a spur to innovation and competition, though (what's sauce for the schools is sauce for the pharma). If the results of any such research went into the public domain, I actually see no loss to big Pharma.

And as for whether or not One Of Us Is Hallucinating all can say is, dude—YOU'RE the one that works with drugs.

It's not that you in the pharmaceutical industry have let perception get out of hand. It's that I have different issues than "big Pharma." Also I consider the world to be like a ball of yarn…lift a thread and the whole ball comes with it.

Also, I don't think you have to worry much about the virulence of my opinion being wide spread. Frankly, if health care costs were such they didn't scare the bejeezus out of your average person I wouldn't much care who owned what.