At that point it's probably just cheaper to get a plane ticket to a country that does not patent or enforce a patent for the treatment.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/24/josiah-zayne...
That's a bit of an understatement. The difference between doing CRISPR on a cell and a petri dish and doing it in a human is huge. That's why no one has done it yet.
There is a big difference between injecting reagents into a single human, and doing actual medicine.
Moreover a lot techniques for gene therapy are already in the literature. Moreover you have to document what it's doing or what your doing for approval (in-case of a procedure).
The ethical thing to do is constructing a system that maximizes the amount of lifesaving medical care at minimum cost. Doing that requires acknowledging market forces. Scientists and engineers aren't any more altruistic than anyone else. These days the incoming classes at investment banks are full of physics, biology, and chemistry majors that could easily have gotten a PhD and went to go work for NIH. In the healthcare space, there is at least the potential for making a lot of money by doing a startup with the hopes of getting acquired by one of the big pharma companies. If you take that option away--if developing lifesaving medical care is a field that nets you at best a GS-scale government job--talent and capital are going to go develop dating apps instead.
That being said, obviously we have to fund development somehow.
Let's say we have a disease that kills 1000 people per year. Let's look at a 40 year period.
1. No cure is researched or found in 40 years. Total death count: 40,000.
2. For the first 10 years no cure is found. After 10 years a company comes along and creates a lifesaving cure, however it's expensive - only 500 people per year can afford it. The patent on it lasts 20 years. After 20 years another company creates a generic version of it that 990 people can afford. In the first 10 years 10,000 people die, in the following 20 years another 10,000 people die, in the last 10 years 100 people die. Total death count: 20,100.
3. No cure is found in the first 20 years, then a government funded research team finds a cure. A company picks it up and creates a generic, where 99% people can afford it. In the first 20 years 20,000 people die. In the latter 20 years 200 people die. Total death count: 20,200.
Being early matters in medicine. It's always easy to look at an expensive treatment and say that this should be much cheaper, but we usually don't consider that forcing investors out of healthcare means that less research will be done. This means fewer treatments and a longer time before a treatment is found.
There is only one detail I cannot understand. Why competition doesn't work? Why some new investors (who are not invested in drugs yet) do not invest in the research of new drug that heals all the diseases, to sell this drug for $1 -- they would destroy existing system, but they would get all the market at once. (Or in a smaller scale they might make a drug that treats some disease once and for all, and shrink not the pie overall, but some part of it).
You might even argue that the money saved by not having a patent could be used to save even more lives.
4. Nobody makes any attempt to create a treatment, but after only six months a miracle occurs. Nobody dies and everybody is cured for no reason.
Not saying that there isn't any, but where is the evidence that a government funded research team would be slower than the privately funded one?
If the government invests $100 billion into medical research and private companies invest another $100 billion then we're probably getting more medical research done than if only the government invested $100 billion into medical research, and the private companies spent the $100 billion on making movies.
This sounds great. We'd like to imagine that the companies would now expend all their energy towards developing new treatments, even ones that might not have been economically feasible before (think: the 'problem' of cure vs treat), and everybody would live happily ever after. Unfortunately, there's another way of looking at this. You just changed the company's goal away from market success and onto playing a game of min-maxing on government funding.
We have countless analogs to draw from here. Anytime a complex industry starts getting involved with government funding suddenly the entire game changes. It's not about producing anything, but instead about doing exactly what's necessary to keep, and maximize, the amount of funding received. And sure we'd like to imagine you could just create a million rules and regulations to try to ensure that this means exactly 'producing new amazing treatments' but actually doing that is not really practical. And, that's also ignoring the fact that these systems also rapidly lend themselves towards corruption:
'Well I tell you what Senator Pharmaceutical Commission Chair, we've been looking at building a new pharmaceutical research facility. And [your state] is looking right top notch. And you know what, voters will love those jobs we'll bring, and it'll even be a tax windfall in the longrun. The only thing that's stopping us from this is resources. Just something to keep in mind when you go draw up that next fiscal allotment. And ya know, you also might want to consider retirement. Once you leave office - we'd be mighty grateful for some of those great insights you have. We're always looking for consultants with the right sort of experience, if you know what I mean.'
I suppose a trade secret would prevent circumventing IP law by heading to a more permissive jurisdiction and is potentially indefinite. But then again, if anyone ever successfully reverse engineered it (or it leaked) my understanding is you can't patent it in retrospect? So it seems like a huge risk to me.
From an ethical standpoint, I'm not seeing where it would be any worse than a patent (one that's actually enforced). Unless you're concerned about the possibility of the knowledge becoming lost to humanity? Or something else?
An aside: I wouldn't be optimistic about the usefulness of trade secrets on their own in the biomedical sciences. It can certainly be tedious to reverse engineer something, but my impression is that it's generally the IP laws that stop your potential competition.
It sucks. I'm with some others who say that we should try to improve our society so that nobody would have to make such a choice.
Clinics aren't subject to the same requirement and can legally turn indigent patients away.