Pathfinders: Patent nonsense (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Suppose that, under capitalism’s property laws, you could patent the human genome. Then, in theory, you would own the ‘rights’ to 8 billion people and their descendants, in perpetuity.

You can’t, of course, but not because people haven’t tried. Almost as soon as the DNA double helix was discovered, its co-discoverer James Watson was asked if he intended to patent it.

He thought the idea ridiculous, but was largely alone in that opinion, as every half-baked geneticist that followed saw it as a gold rush and filed patents left, right and centre. Watson, for all his dodgy views on other matters, was convinced this technology ought to be available for the common welfare, and fought the claim-stakers, including through the courts. He couldn’t stop the rush though, and about 20 percent of the human genome, around 6,000 genes, were indeed patented. But then, in 2013 the US Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that human DNA could not be patented as it is a ‘product of nature’, which is to say, a thing which human labour has not appreciably changed or modified. This is, by the way, in line with what socialists say about human labour being the only real source of value. If it’s had no human labour usefully expended on it, you can’t patent it.

Fast forward to the MRSA antibiotic crisis, which caused over a million deaths worldwide in 2019, more than malaria or AIDS (tinyurl.com/yuasm6zw ), and could even lead to a resurgence of plague (tinyurl.com/2ucn7etk).

Antibiotics were such a wonder drug when they were first used in the 1940s that they came to be gobbled up like smarties for just about everything, including as a disease prophylactic in meat, bird and fish farming, and with scant regard for the tendency of bacteria to fight back in a ceaseless evolutionary arms race. Common interest, in a socialist society of democratic common ownership, would very likely have raised the alarm early on, but for the atomised actors of capitalism, this was another tragedy of the commons scenario. But the folly doesn’t end there – capitalism’s patent system, which defenders say drives innovation, actually prevented crucial innovation, in not one but two ways.

Firstly, the flip side of patents is that when they expire, anyone can use the technology, or copy it, for free, making the patent worthless to the holder. Since most antibiotic patents were taken out in the 1940s, they have now expired, so the big pharma companies – the ones with all the R&D cash – see no prospect of further profit and have abandoned antibiotic research, just when we need them to step up the gears.

At the risk of labouring the obvious, drug companies are not in business to cure people, but to make profits, exactly like the arms industry, the car industry, in fact any industry. If they can make more money out of hair restorer and slimming drugs, that’s what they’ll invest in. Capitalist logic is what it is, even if it kills us all, which is why we advocate a socialist system of production for needs instead.

Secondly, antibiotics aren’t the only way to treat bacterial infections. You could use bacteriophages – viruses that ‘eat’ bacteria – to target and destroy the offending bacterium. Phages are very specific so you’d need the right one, culled from a huge database. This makes them harder to use than broad-spectrum antibiotics, but the advantage of phages is that they evolve, right along with the bacterium they target, meaning the bacterium can never develop permanent resistance.

Phages are proven and effective, and have been used for a century at the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia. The Institute has been treating patients with phage therapies since the 1920s, and is so successful that people fly in from all around the world to get treatment for bacterial illnesses their own doctors have pronounced incurable (tinyurl.com/m28sfm6e ).

So, given this, have phages been enthusiastically seized upon in the West, as the technology that can rescue us from the MRSA crisis? Er, no. But surely the west is planning to use them, and scale up mass phage production? Again, no. Well, there must at least be a million phage studies currently underway by western universities and drug companies? Actually, there are almost none.

WTF?

You see, here’s the rub. Phages are a ‘product of nature’, which means… you guessed it. They can’t be patented, and therefore, there is no potential profit.

Currently, some western biotech companies are working on ways to get round this restriction, using CRISPR gene-editing to tweak phages just enough to be able to claim that they are a human artefact and therefore patentable. If the tweak does something useful that’s lovely, but beside the point. The problem with this workaround is that you can’t be sure what effect the tweak is going to have, so there will be all kinds of clinical trials and regulatory hurdles to negotiate. But not to worry, capitalist regulators are not as independent as they pretend. Bodies such as the UK’s NICE and America’s FDA are subject to a degree of ‘regulatory capture’ by drug companies, who finance the bodies via required registration fees, and also promise cushy industry jobs tomorrow on the understanding that regulators play ball today (tinyurl.com/537m35am). So tweaked phages might end up being approved by fair means or foul.

Meanwhile it’s not entirely game over for antibiotics. A new class of synthetic antibiotics is able to combat drug-resistant bacteria by targeting several key proteins at once, meaning that the bacterium would have to evolve a defence against all points of attack simultaneously, a highly unlikely feat (tinyurl.com/4evjaryr). Good news, for those who can afford it.

The take-home from all this is that, in the ongoing war on MRSA, insofar as capitalism gets it right, it’s doing exactly what socialism would do. But, unlike socialism, it is critically hampered by its own profit-chasing logic, first in solving problems, and second, in not preventing them from arising in the first place.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Down on the Pharma (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The flu season is upon us again and readers will be delighted to hear that swine flu has not been idle. Tests have been taking place after a woman died last month from swine flu contracted at a country fair in Ohio, and three more cases were reported from Minnesota. The flu strain, H1N2, is derived from the 2009 H1N1 virus, is air-borne and carries the pandemic M gene. All victims had prolonged contact with pigs, however a different strain, H3N2, has caused 296 infections across 10 US states since July this year (Link). The message at present is that people at high risk should stay away from pigs, state fairs or Korea, where the H1N2 strain is said to be a ‘triple reassortant’ virus in that it is a mix of avian, swine and human flu (Link).

Scientists are being cautious, obviously. Nobody is going to cry wolf this time, after they got the blame for the huge panic in 2009. Although there was a swine flu pandemic on that occasion it was nothing like the civilisation-ending apocalypse the excitable media had led everyone to believe.

The Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta, which publishes regular information on pandemic threats, is part of a global body of research institutions which, for obvious reasons, would be required almost exactly as-is in a socialist society. Nobody can possibly question the value of what such institutions do. Even creationists, who claim not to believe in evolution, rush fast enough for their annual vaccinations and understand well enough the need for them. We humans are locked in an arms race with microbes and only the most vigilant monitoring stands between us and some disaster of truly biblical proportions.

Other threats, however, are more debatable. Many of the scientists working on the H1N1 virus in 2009 objected to the research being published, for fear that terrorists could use the work to create a synthetic weapon. After 9/11 and a brief wave of anthrax letter-bombs the USA took this threat very seriously, and set up the Biowatch programme, which consisted of networks of sensors in urban areas including underground stations, designed to spot attempts to poison the public (New Scientist, 15 September). Ten years on and Biowatch has produced a null result, which ‘proves’ to its supporters that it has worked. This is like the old joke that an elephant-repellent spray must be working if you can’t see any elephants. Detractors however point to the billion dollar bill and the fact that in the same decade there has not been a single biological terrorism attack anywhere in the world. Given the clumsy, low-tech efforts of many would-be bombers in the past, perhaps the threat of such people managing to develop a bioweapon has indeed been overstated.

But what is one to make of the fact that a very real and present threat, one which everybody knows about, is actually being increasingly ignored? Hospitals are riddled with MRSA and c. Diff. so that it can be more dangerous to go to hospital than stay at home. 60 percent of infectious disease specialists report encountering infections untreatable by any antibiotic. Just when antibiotic resistance is becoming a world-wide problem, it turns out that drug companies are pulling out of antibiotic research (‘NIH superbug outbreak highlights lack of new antibiotics’, WashingtonPost, 25 August). Why? The answer is revealing.

In the first place, the antibiotic honeymoon is over. Like peak oil, we’ve hit peak bio, after which every development is harder and more expensive. It is all about the return on investment. When the field lay wide open in the 1940s and there was plenty of claim to stake and patents to be had, it was a bonanza. Now the well is dry, but unlike oil there is no way to wean humans off the need for antibiotics without seeing a return of the bubonic plague and other horrors. But drug companies are businesses which worry about profit, not plagues, so they are doing the sensible thing and pulling the plug on antibiotic research. You can’t argue the logic when you can make more money out of an erectile dysfunction drug than out of antibiotics. Of the 12 largest pharmaceutical companies only 4 are still doing any research.The largest, Pfizer, has laid off 1200 workers and closed its antibiotic research centre in Connecticut and moved to Shanghai and out of antibiotic research altogether.

Alternatives to antibiotics are, like alternatives to oil, scarcely credible at present. The widely-mooted idea of engineering viruses to eat bacterial pathogens is still some way off, with the first clinical trial in Western Europe only taking place in 2009. Bacteriophages are hard to make, because unlike antibiotics they are not one-size-fits-all. Each pathogen strain requires a different phage, and when a pandemic may present multiple strains simultaneously this is an obvious disadvantage. They are also hard to store, and of course each one has to go through independent regulatory hurdles before being approved for use. Given the increased expense of development plus the tightly restricted potential for patent exploitation, this is likely to make phage research even more unattractive to big pharma than antibiotics. In the event of a pandemic, phage research and production may very well be too slow and cumbersome to respond.

Antibiotics too are facing even more severe regulatory hurdles because of the scare surrounding the antibiotic Ketek, which led to a number of deaths in 2006. With lawyers circling hungrily, no drug regulator is taking any chances. At a time when new drugs are becoming ever more vital, regulators are stamping on the brakes.

‘It’s a case of evolution outrunning capitalism,’ says the Washington Post report. But it’s not a case of capitalism somehow failing to keep up with evolution, as if the two are locked in mortal combat. While the money was in antibiotics, capitalism delivered. Now it isn’t, capitalism has simply lost interest in the matter. The fact that the human race could potentially be decimated doesn’t enter into it.

This is one of the worst indictments of capitalism that it’s possible to make, its absolute defiance of common sense and the interests of the human species it supposedly serves. When science, logic and self-preservation all indicate one road, and money indicates the other, capitalism doesn’t think twice. People who congratulate capitalism for its competitive drive to produce innovation should reflect on the fact that no matter how much ingenuity it inspires in humans desperate to pay their rent, it stands capable at any moment of making the wrong decision just when the consequences could be fatal.

Paddy Shannon