1w ago

Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness?

newsroom.ucla.edu Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness?

How Bruin genetic scientists are reawakening hibernating follicles.

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Through UCLA’s Technology Transfer Group, which transforms brilliant research into global market products, the scientists have co-founded a medical development company called Pelage Pharmaceuticals
In case you were curious how this publicly funded research is going to be turned into private profits.
- I don't think UCLA is going to produce retail products themselves.
  
  They could always make the research and processes public domain, so no one person can unilaterally profit.
  But that's not what they did, and that's the problem.
  
  Research isn't free either.
  
  Of course not, which is why they're publicly funded. That's the issue. They're using public funds to make private profits.
  
  It's amazing you even have to explain something so obvious.
  
  People gotta start down the road of anti-capitalism somewhere, right?
  
  So how should we make this available to people then?
  
  License and release it into the public domain: research, methods, processes, patents—the whole deal.
  Privatizing medicine, even elective medicine, just ensures predation.
  
  I'm not following. Making the results public domain doesn't prohibit private companies from manufacturing for profit.
  
  No, you got it. It's not about prohibiting profit, it's about preventing the exclusive ability to profit.
  Think of generic medicines (in the US) versus brand equivalents and how vast their cost difference is.
  
  Which is reasonable in principle, but when they sell the exclusivity, they're and to put that money back into their research expenses.
  I'm okay with public money going to funding research projects that become private profit for a limited time. I'm a capitalist system, which is what we're operating in, this seems to be the most effective. Government partially funds otherwise unprofitable R&D, companies make the product, and ordinary people are able to buy it at reasonable prices, and once exclusivity ends, anyone can make it.
  
  That would be great, except in the US, that exclusivity can last for decades, which means entire generations will come and go before it becomes public.
  In a better-regulated system where consumers are put before corporate interests, it could work, but the US hasn't been that for a long time.
- I think this is pretty standard procedure no? Lots of small companies are spin-outs from universities

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