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Comment by pmiller2 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't ask. This is what eminent domain is literally for.

If you seize someone's company every time they have a worthwhile breakthrough, that's really going to put a damper on working on problems like this. Not only would you be toiling for uncertain/small reward, you might be flushing your entire business down the toilet.

Also, you seize the company-- then what? Are you going to be able to ramp up production, etc, as well as the original product group could? Are you going to make them work on it at gunpoint?

I agree there's a good point to this. At the same time I dislike and disbelieve the capitalist narrative that the deepest motivation is the profit one.

It's not that the deepest motivation is the profit one. It's that it's the best at bringing together large scale consistent cooperative teams. When you have a profit motive, you don't need to convince every single necessary person or resource provider to believe in your mission, you just have to pay them. And that makes a lot of things possible that wouldn't otherwise be.

Eminent domain in the US still requires fair compensation.

Indeed, a 20% return would be more than fair, wouldn’t it? So, pay off their development costs + 20%.

Oh yah, that makes a lot of sense. /s IF you succeed, you get upside bounded at +20%, but you still have full downside risk. And of course, most things in bio R&D don't work.

Also, re: your other hyperbole point-- this test system is neat and fills a small gap in testing capabilities. It does not have the ability to "save millions of lives" but could be a nice tool among many to help slow things down. It doesn't scale well, so it's not how you'll do most tests, but there are scenarios where having a close-to-immediate result noticeably helps.

> Show me another breakthrough in the past 100 years that could save millions of lives ...

The past century is littered with thousands of examples of technologies that have contributed in this or bigger ways. The Rosch and Abbott machines are going to be the workhorses here, not the Cepheid ones.

No, you make 20% and save millions of lives. Identifying and quarantining the infected is literally the only tool we have now to slow this pandemic.

It seems you missed both points:

* "Making" 20% if you happen to be successful, when most efforts fail, is not much of a prize-- especially if you lose your company in the process. Not even the most diehard gambler would play slots with those rules. ;)

* It's not going to save millions of lives. There's lots of tests available meeting different needs. It may save some lives, and will likely improve quality of life of those suspected of having COVID-19 quite a bit.

Identifying and quarantining is a complicated strategy and this test is not going to be the "workhorse" of it and is certainly not going to save millions of lives. Look to Rosch, Abbott, and others that have made pieces of already-deployed infrastructure to fill that need.

20% for a few months worth of effort is more than fair. They would not lose the entire company, simply the rights to the specific technology. And, even if it is "the whole company," then they can go start another one, or go cry me a fucking river. You seem to think I care; I don't.

Mass testing literally will save lives. It worked in South Korea. If we could run 700M tests (slightly more than 2 per US resident, because you have to run at least 2 as an accuracy check) right now, I guarantee you we could get this under control.

Don't believe me? Believe this guy. He's a doctor:

> Testing, Testing, Testing: We must widely test our population, diagnose mild and even asymptomatic cases. Requires point of care diagnostics in doctor's office. We must advance these immediately to market. It means serology to know who was exposed and developed immunity. 9/n

(From https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/12414195930144849... )

But, every incremental step helps here. Information is literally our only weapon against this disease right now, and testing is how you get that. Getting something like this into the hands of doctors on the front line right now is what is needed.

TL;DR: You are wrong on both counts.

> 20% for a few months worth of effort is more than fair. They would not lose the entire company, simply the rights to the specific technology. And, even if it is "the whole company," then they can go start another one, or go cry me a fucking river. You seem to think I care; I don't.

The rapid test technology is something that Cepheid has been developing since before 2010. Now they have gotten approval to load reagents into the disposable cartridges their machine uses to test for COVID-19. There is no way to parcel off "just this test".

> Mass testing literally will save lives. It worked in South Korea. If we could run 700M tests

The Cepheid technology, as I've been patiently explaining to you, is about the dumbest way to run millions of tests.

The Cepheid test costs about $40 in raw materials, when a similar test from Roche has an underlying cost of $0.75, but it requires a much lower degree of operator skill and capital equipment. But because it requires less operator skill and less capital equipment, it can be closer to patients, especially in remote areas.

But you're too much into "rah rah let's nationalize the technology" before you even realize what it's useful for. Neat.

Okay, it's been in development for 10 years? 20% per year, then. Done. A 200% return over 10 years is a CAGR of 11.61%, just a hair lower than what you'd get dumping it all into an S&P 500 index fund on 2010-01-01 and cashing out 2019-12-31, plus you get to put "saved millions of lives" on your resume. Totally fair.

You don't think the US government can afford $80 ($40x2, because you should run 2 tests for confirmation) to test every resident of the country? Google tells me there are 327.2M people in the US. $80/person is only $26 billion. How much are we spending again on useless foreign wars that nobody questions? How much did the Fed spend in a failed effort to stabilize the market a couple weeks ago?

You also forgot, this test returns results in 45 minutes, whereas the other version takes hours. Reducing the time to result by an order of magnitude means you can test an order of magnitude more people. You said it right here: "... it requires a much lower degree of operator skill and capital equipment. But because it requires less operator skill and less capital equipment, it can be closer to patients, especially in remote areas."

So, what do you want, $26 billion in the US treasury, or every single human inside the US borders to be tested for coronavirus? Granted, that testing will not happen instantaneously, but it will happen far, far faster with this technology deployed at scale than not. And, I don't see Cephid moving to put 10 of these in every hospital in the country yet. Do you?

Let me put it to you another way: do you want to go the way South Korea has, or the way Italy has?

I want to use the machines that are built for high volume testing, and not try to ramp up production of a cost-inefficient cartridge thing for the bulk of testing that we could never get enough tests from in a reasonable time. (Takes a week+ to make tooling for injection molding even on an expedited basis and I guarantee you they cannot produce enough of these fancy plastic cartridges to test everyone with present tooling).

Of course, I also want to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the cartridge based system where they're most useful.

This is mostly because I'm not stupid. Neither is South Korea; they're getting fine just by with traditional, cost-efficient RT-PCR practices.

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