Invention

Mount a defence of the actions taken by multinational pharmaceutical companies to maintain and uphold their intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the international economy in recent years. Pharmaceuticals invest a lot of money to research and develop new and drugs. They therefore require intellectual property rights in terms of patents, creating a temporary monopoly to recoup the investment the initially made. If they did not have this patent system they will stop researching as there is no incentive to invest money and not obtain any feasible profits. However the patent rights which the pharmaceutical industry uses is challenged under the reason that patents stop generic companies to create the same drug at the fraction of the price for countries which are poor and can’t afford the drugs.

This essay will firstly look into what intellectual property rights are and in terms of patents what they do and how they are enforced. The essay is doing to defend the patent use, explaining why pharmaceuticals need these patents in place and what challenges they face in the pharmaceutical industry. The essay will then consider some of the critics of the parents’ monopoly created which will then lead to TRIPs agreement and how that enforces the pharmaceutical intellectual property right protection. The TRIPs critics has further led to the Doha deceleration which has had major impacts on the pharmaceutical and finally look at a case with Novartis suing the India’s government.

Intellectual property rights refer to rights given to the owner and creator of a result of human intellectual creativity. The product should be unique and un-obvious with some value in market. In terms of the pharmaceuticals it is the chemical formula of a new drug. The objective is to protect the right of the creator of the work, whilst allowing public to access the creativity. It is possible to establish ownership rights over intellectual property through patents, copyrights and trademarks. (Hill, 2001)

Pharmaceutical companies protect their intellectual property rights through patents. Patents grant the inventor of a new product or process exclusive rights to manufacture, use or sale of the innovation for up to 20 years from the date of application. For the pharmaceuticals the invention is often a new molecule or a family of molecule for the treatment of a particular disease, or a method of producing a drug. (pjonline.com).

A monopoly is given to the owner of usually 20 years. During this period no-one can reproduce it, although they might just use the method to some up with their own independent invention. The specification which is the patent document is available publicly. So it can be used to understand invention so that it can be used as soon as it expires. So for a pharmaceutical where the research and development is very expensive however the manufacturing is cheap, patents are useful to keep the rights. However there are fees to be paid to the patent office to make a product patent.

Patents are enforced through countries recognizing the intellectual property rights; they then enforce them into their domestic laws. This suggests that they can not be employed everywhere they depend on territories. The extent of the patent protection depends from country to country. The patent holders have to obtain the rights in each country where they wish to enforce their patents. The patent tries to strike a balance between two important aims: the need to encourage invention and the desire to spread the benefits of inventions as widely as possible. (Patently wrong, open world). It is important that inventors or the companies who employ them get just rewards. They are very important to motivate for the innovation.

To bring a new pharmaceutical on the market requires great investment, which is mostly spent in testing the product for safety and efficacy. It may be possible to manufacture the medicines easily, but it is necessary to charge the high prices in order to recoup the capital spent on testing; not only on the final product but on the other which fail to reach that stage. If there was no patents, a copier who doesn’t suffer the cost of research and development could offer the medicine at a much lower price but still be making healthy profits. Also they will be a standing competition against the original creator of the medicine.

The drug development process takes a great deal of time. For a brand new medicine or vaccine to appear on the market it firstly takes 2 years to do the lead finding which consist of research planning, obtain test compounds and screening. Then a further 4-6 years are spent on preclinical trials and then again another 4-6 years on clinical trials and then finally 2-3 years on registration, launch and sales. Therefore on average it can take from 8-15 years.

If a strongly negative result is obtained at any stage of the process the entire project is abandoned. It is estimated that for every 5000 compounds that are tested only one actually gets marketed. This indicates the huge risk capital the companies invest. GSK invest $4 billion each year on its research and development. In 2003 R&D represented 14.8% of the pharmaceutical sales. Compared to other industries as percentage of sales in 2002 the pharmaceutical industry spent over 18%, computer software 17%, automotive 5% and telecommunication spent about 3%. (gsk.com).

Also many believe that majority of the new drugs are discovered by government and universities researchers and that the drug development cost is largely funded by the government. However this is proved incorrect as by Christopher Viehbacher, President of GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals US: “Ninety-one percent of the top selling medicines available were developed by pharmaceutical companies, but bringing just one of those medicines to patient’s costs as much or more than a space shuttle mission. And it’s the medicines we buy today at the pharmacy that are financing tomorrow’s discoveries”.

So 91% of research comes from pharmaceuticals companies and the government’s only funds for a few drugs for rare diseases. Also the resources which are required to make a drug are beyond the governments reach, they could not afford to create them. All great investment is recouped from the sales of the drug or vaccine. By not having patents, sales by the imitators whom do not have to take the cost of the overheads would destroy any possibilities of the inventor to recover its investments and then in a result no initial investments would be made.

The value of the patent drugs to the pharmaceuticals companies can be seen after the Patent expires when generic drugs are available the price often drops by 80%. Another factor is time for which the patent is implemented for. The point of development which the patent is filled varies from company to company, but this would normally be at an early stage. Although as discussed that the patent time is normally 20years by the time that the patent comes to the market the product only have exclusive rights of up to 8-12 years. This explains why many pharmaceutical giants are always looking to extend their patent rights which would be effective to them. This also explains the importance of understanding why the TRIPs give 20 years protection. Countries such as India whom only give ten years or less for pharmaceutical companies are actually not giving any patents at all.

The best ideas arise from a passionate interest in commonplace things Mankind has demonstrated a profound ability to draw inspiration from even the most mundane situations and surroundings. Throughout history, the commonplace has often spurred uncommon achievements for impassioned thinkers including Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. In modern times, the scientific community increasingly gleans groundbreaking ideas from the natural world in the emerging field of biomimicry.

Archimedes’ eureka moment in the bath is the stuff of legend, but it is unlikely the great mathematician and inventor would have delivered the famed remark without pursuing his profound interest in hydrodynamics and the intertwined relationships of buoyancy and displacement. On one hand, water was (and remains) a ubiquitous presence for the seafaring Greeks. Likewise, anyone who has watched a child in the bathtub can relate to the simple joys it affords.

Archimedes eponymous principle, however, took a natural interest in water and floating bodies several steps further to determine whether a crown was made of solid gold and better define the laws of physics. Leonardo da Vinci, the archetypal Renaissance Man, was unquestionably inspired by commonplace things throughout his feverishly productive life. One must look no further than the genius’s manuscripts and notebooks for evidence that da Vinci was intensely curious about some of the world’s most ordinary elements.

Studies of the human body, certainly among the most familiar of forms, are likely the master’s most replicated composition. Perhaps it is no coincidence the Italian’s Vitruvian Man pen-and-ink sketch ranks among the most well-known and reproduced drawings in the world. Whether Leonardo’s passion and interest in reproducing the human body contributed to his other innovations and inventions beyond art is difficult to assess, but one thing is certain: da Vinci’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge of his earthly surroundings was inextricably tied to his ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The unlikely course of events that lead Isaac Newton to formulate the theory of gravity offers an example of a revolutionary idea spurred by something as banal as a piece of fruit. “What is the invisible force that causes an apple to fall to the ground? ” the great thinker wondered. While some have disputed the veracity of Newton’s apple incident, there is no doubting the role the everyday world played in conjunction with Newton’s observant and contemplative mind.

While the laws of motion took years to fully devise and compose, there is perhaps no better illustration of the nascent brilliance the human mind is capable of revealing when awakened by the natural elements. Many of the world’s leading contemporary minds continue to find inspiration in their environs. Over the last decade, the scientific community has become more willing to turn to nature for answers to difficult questions. As it turns out, potentially outstanding ideas have often been tested and confirmed or rejected by the flora and fauna all around us through natural selection, according to pioneers in the biomimicry field.

Proponents of biomimicry have studied humpback whale flippers as a means to improve wind turbine performance and plant leaves as a model for “green cleaning” process that some paints and building materials now incorporate. Clearly there is much still to be learned from nature. It has been a long time coming, but it appears many in the world are prepared to accept that the best ideas arise from a passionate interest in commonplace things. Perhaps necessity is not the true mother of invention – history demonstrates that inquiring minds and Mother Nature herself more often inspire greatness.

Now I wish to talk about barriers that women amateurs face in working in science and technology. Lamarr is a great example of how an amateur can both overcome and be stopped by barriers. Just a little background info, Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian –American actress who was also known to be the most beautiful woman in Hollywood in her time. You might think what does she have to do with what have been said before this. Well, she was the brains who basically started it all, the spread-spectrum technology which enabled Wi-Fi and cellular networks to be available to us today!

Lamarr knew about a real problem. It was during World War 2 when she thought, how can one safely control a torpedo with a radio signal? This was important, since torpedoes were not very accurate and the ability to remotely control them could be immensely valuable. The difficulty in using a radio signal to control a torpedo is essentially the problem of jamming. If you tried to control your torpedo by a signal, eventually the enemy will find out the frequency you are using.

Once this is known they could jam your control signal by putting out a strong noise signal on the given frequency. Lamarr had a solution. Her brilliant idea was to use frequency hopping—her invention. Lamarr also found a co-inventor, George Antheil, who was also an avant-garde composer, who laid out a system based on 88 frequencies, corresponding to the number of keys on a piano, using perforated paper rolls which would turn in sync with one another, transmitting and receiving ever-changing frequencies, preventing interception and jamming.

They then submitted the frequency hopping device to the national inventors council where they went on to file a patent application. Unfortunately, she did not succeed to release this idea to help during the war. There were other priorities faced by the US military, along with the decreasing number of resources that were being used to make other equipments and atomic bombs. Also, she isnt your usual inventor. Who would believe a Hollywood actress could help invent something useful for the war? Furthermore, she was ahead of technology.

Spread-spectrum requires a fairly powerful digital computational ability. The technology that was available in 1940? s was very crude, and it is likely that it was essentially impossible to make her ideas work. BUT twenty years after its conceptualization, during the Cuban missile crisis, the first instance of large-scale military deployment of Lamarr and Antheil’s frequency hopping technology was implemented– not for the remote-controlled guidance of torpedoes, but to provide secure communications among the ships involved in the naval blockade.

Lamarr’s brilliant idea is used today in wireless communication. Not exactly as she envisioned in her original patented work, but nevertheless in ways that are clearly traceable to her ideas. Lamarr eventually got the recognition she deserved but 3 years before her death. She and her co-inventor Antheil won the 1997 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. She also won the BULBIE that is called the “Oscar” of inventing. Hedy Lamarr had proved to being more than just a “pretty face”.

My resources:

1. http://rjlipton. wordpress. com/2010/07/25/hedy-lamarr-the-inventor/

For those who do not consider themselves basketball fans, the sport’s significance may seem irrelevant or of very little. While these people may not think to thank Dr. James Naismith for his invention of the game, we should all thank him for the major contributions he made and paths he paved for this country. Although basketball may be seen as just a sport played for fun and enjoyment, its invention’s impact on Americans was huge, positive, and everlasting. The inventor himself had a very strange and rough road to get to that infamous winter night that the game was created.

James Naismith wasn’t born in your ideal view of a basketball setting, but in Canada. Both his mother and father passed away of typhoid fever before he had turned nine years old. James then moved in with his uncle in Springfield, Massachusetts, terribly overwhelmed and distressed. He dropped out of school at the age of fifteen because he saw “no need in learning more than he already knew” (Hill 9). If Naismith would have actually gone along with this way of thinking, the journey to the invention of basketball could have ended right then and there.

In fact, the only reason Naismith ever went to college was that his uncle wanted him to become a minister. He went on to attend Presbyterian College, where the invention was a great case of serendipity. While he was there, there were no sports being played between football and baseball season due to the cold weather. He noticed athletes were bored and as he would later write, he was “just trying to find a solution to a problem” (Hill 7). This indoor game played with peach baskets soon exploded in popularity and the rest was history.

In the mid-1800s a majority, if not all, of American culture was adopted from another country. Baseball was being played, which was derived from the . The sport of lacrosse was learned from the Native Americans. We even cooked like Europeans and dressed like them. We, of course, had broken off politically, but we struggled to find difference materialistically. Basketball, however, fostered both pride and identity (Gems). The game was American-made and everyone wanted a part in it. A communal interest was taken and people were proud to call it theirs.

The game taught, and still teaches, a great lesson in diversity. Lots of people grew to know the meaning of the word through their experiences with the sport. The term was significant in studying and analyzing other teams’ and players’ basketball approaches, such as the types of plays they ran or just how good they were. More importantly, however, diversity among people was discovered. The sport broadened stereotypes and views of other races. It allowed players to realize that there are no real differences. In the late 1890s, basketball’s very early days, ethnically diverse advocates of the game were very prevalent.

Groups like the German Turners, Czech Sokols, and Polish Falcons loved the sport and “acquiesced to the interests of second-generation youths such as basketball” (Gems). Integration saw a huge advancement due to basketball. Teams all across the country were being formed and they would play against each other. Teams in this time were not allowed to be mixed. It was either a white team or an African American team. After a few years, “in the North, the African American teams proved to be the best” (Gems). This allowed the blacks to feel like, for the first time, they were not completely and utterly below the whites.

African Americans found hope and determination through the sport in a time where society was so cruel to them. These players also gave the game something that would change basketball forever. They added a “style of play that…emphasized speed, agility, superior jumping ability and creative ball handling which today are hallmarks of the game that millions of Americans love” (Logan). Due to their capabilities and the racial diversity the sport of basketball quickly saw, African Americans were widely respected and accepted in professional leagues in the North soon after its creation.

Also, children learned a lot about racial equality through playing ball in their communities. Although kids in the neighborhood became friends, children of varying races didn’t talk much until they played basketball where “[children] played basketball together, black and white, without incident” (Kelley). The tension, of course, was not completely gone, but once the games began race was forgotten. Even today the sport brings all kinds of people together in all levels of competition. Women gained a lot as well from this sport. Through playing, women began to feel quality as they reached the same stardom as men who also played.

Even early on, “women’s games were known for having a strong male fan base as well as entire families in attendance” (Milner). It would have been very rare before this for women to be so supported by men, and the public in the general. Women before Naismith’s time had little to no rights and were very restricted to the things they could do that men also did. Being able to play in professional leagues with men was a very big step for their gaining of equality. Eventually, the WNBA was created, becoming the first professional women’s league of the four major U. S. sports.

Many international links were formed through basketball as well. The originally American sport rapidly spread to all parts of the world where the game was loved. Worldwide leagues have since been created, spreading competition, as well as the sport’s popularity. The U. S. however, displayed global dominance in the sport right away. America won the first seven gold medals in Olympic basketball after the sport was added permanently in 1936 (Milner). This case of superiority added even more to America’s sense of pride and identity. Like everything else, basketball is not, by any means, perfect.

There are some flaws with the sport that can be seen as very problematic. However, these issues are not in the slightest case unique and would be very hard to eliminate completely. Throughout the basketball world, minors who showcase special talent or potential are often victims of illegal action. Through gambling, recruiting, and scandals, these young athletes are the center of black-market professionalism caused by “corporate money funneled into amateur sports” (Wetzel introduction). All members involved in these leagues are sucked into the corruption.

Teams, coaches, and whole universities are often sucked into the aftermath of a scandal. This puts a bad label on sometimes undeserving participants. The sport, and everything that comes with it, also puts a multitude of pressure on kids. Shoe, companies with high deals to offer, make children feel like they must cooperate in order to have their dreams come true. Teenagers become more focused on the money than the sport they love. These campaigns startle “college, high school, and even junior high school students with ongoing exploitation” (Wetzel introduction).

These campaigns also cause for some major let-downs. Aspiring young players who see these ads and promises of fame and fortune work hard only to have their dreams crushed. Some advocates of this way of viewing the inside of basketball may say that society should be appalled. According to Dan Wetzel, this is “an important alarm to society that for too long has ignored the dark business behind amateur sports- and what it does to those who play them” (introduction). However, I don’t see this as an overwhelming, shocking issue. Crime like this happens everywhere, and in all sports.

There in no way to ensure that this isn’t done. We should focus more on the bright side of this culture Naismith has given us and not pick out the negatives. Those young athletes who do make it symbolize everything that amateur players play for. They look back and admire where they’ve been and how they got to where they are. They are filled with admiration of their hard work, the choices they made, and the chances they took. Aside from personal benefit, the rest of society greatly benefits economically from the sport as a whole. Television ratings and ticket sales let towns and businesses prosper.

The amount of events pertaining to the sport is a great device to keep money circulating through cities. Also, the big time stars that certain cities produce often give back to their communities. Charities such as NBA Cares donate to organizations everywhere. This game, this sport, this way of life to some, has so much sentimental value. Basketball teaches so many lifelong lessons that can be applied to anything one does in his or her time. The game “promotes teamwork, spirit, and helps get children active” (Carlo). These three ideas are critical and very behooving in a variety of professions as well as walks of life all across the world.

Basketball also teaches people to never give up. Through adversity, you must keep fighting and pushing through to advance and help your team succeed. Quitting never helps, and if one works hard enough, he will reach his peak, much like Naismith learned. Another great thing this game gives us is friendship. Adults everywhere share camaraderie with one another based on friendships from high school or college which all began on a basketball court. In the words of former NBA player and United States congressman, Bill Bradley, “basketball is the gift that never stops giving. The game is full of great joy and great memory.

Its invention needs to be celebrated. ” Basketball remains one of the driving forces behind Americans through its enjoyment and the life lessons that it teaches. We owe a large part of our sense of pride and identity to Dr. James Naismith. His invention over a hundred and twenty years ago made a huge impact on life back then, as it does now. Without him and his creation, many things that many people take for granted would not be able to be enjoyed. Many of the paths he indirectly paved for this country, and its citizens, goes unnoticed. However, this invention changed our culture and society forever.

Have you ever wondered how the movies or videos that you watch first started? Well, you won’t stay with the doubt for long because I am about to tell you how it all began.

One of the first inventions was called the zoetrope is a cylinder looking gadget which contains drawings in a strip of paper inside that appears to move according to The Museum of Childhood. This invention came out in 1834 by a great inventor called W. G. Horner. His invention is something that lots of people can enjoy by looking at the sequence.In 1867, the first device that showed movies and animated pictures was called a “zoopraxiscope” or the “wheel of life”. This starting invention was patented by a man called William Lincoln.

The zoopraxiscope started by the motion of photographs and drawings. Later in 1895, a portable motion picture camera was invented by Louis Lumiere, a Frenchman. His invention became known as Cinematographe. It was a film processing unit and projector. This invention gave motion pictures the popularity. (According to the History of the Motion Picture

com/library/inventors/blmotionpictures.htm”>http://inventors. about. om/library/inventors/ blmotionpictures . htm). After those two great inventions came even a better one. Thomas Edison and William Dickson, his British assistant, constructed a device for recording movement on film and another to view it in the late 1880s.

(http://www. filmsite. org/pre20sintro. html). But new inventions didn’t stop here; in 1890 a new invention called Kinetograph was constructed by William Dickenson. This device gave directors a reason for motion pictures. The kinetograph was a “motor-powered camara that could photograph motion pictures” according to Film History Before 1920.

It was designed so you were able to move the film through the camara by an electric motor. I think that the way that the inventions were coming was great because every time a new invention came it had better technology and it was a little bit more practical and easier to use than the ones from before. Film creation became greater later on, when one of the five big studios started: Warner Bros. Pictures. This is one of the world’s largest producers of film and entertainment. Warner Bros. Pictures was founded by Polish-Canadian immigrants in 1918.

(According to Wikipedia)