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Comment by fraserharris | Hacker News Reader

Conversely, researchers have poor judgement assessing the economic value of their inventions. There was no ebola outbreak at the time the government (and by that, I mean the bureaucracy) was finding a buyer.

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it's not about the scientist overestimating the value of their inventions, when you pour in years and millions of dollars on research like this you just don't give it away for pretty much nothing. 200K _might_ be considerable amount in personal finance, but when you enter the world of governments and research it's basically a rounding error. 200K? you might've as well given it away for free. When a bureaucrat sells something like this for so cheap all it tells me is they just wanted to pad a cell in one of their spreadsheet quarter of a percent with no regards on the investment and effort that was put into the project.

Giving it away for nothing would be fine -- put it in the public domain for anyone to use how they can. But selling a monopoly right for $200K? That's stealing from the taxpayers -- and Merck.

Putting it in the public domain sounds great, but someone needs to conduct the human trials needed to make it safe and effective. They aren't cheap and producing a vaccine carries huge liability risks.

Someone like... the government that already spent millions developing it?

and how do governments get their money?

Your thinking soundes like an example of the "sunk costs" fallacy.

It doesn't really matter what you invested. All that matters is what someone will pay for it.

But if someone will only pay you a pittance for it, why not hang onto it?

> Conversely, researchers have poor judgement assessing the economic value of their inventions.

Possibly. Or maybe they thought that for a government-funded vaccine that might save thousands of lives, maximizing availability was more important than maximizing economic value for a completely unrelated company. Because they weren't, y'know, sociopaths.

They have poor judgement for being right? Huh?

Survivorship bias. Look at the research into the abysmal rate of technology transfer from universities into industry.

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