#james love

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[daftmooncretin]

my absolute favourite thing about the kirk and spock dynamic is that the whole time you’re watching the show spock is gaslighting you into thinking that kirk is this loose canon and spock is paragon of logic keeping his captain on the straight and narrow when its very clearly the other way round. aside from being turned on by everyone and fighting like an old-timey boxer…. kirk is just like.. quite a logical, stable guy. like yeah he rules with his emotions but he’s rarely reckless or erratic, even in situations of immense pressure he’s always calm and measured. sure kirk is unhinged and insane, but we knew that right off the bat. spock on the other hand tries to hide how insanely balls to the walls crazy he is by standing next to jim and hiding all his derangement with logic. i think the reason bones beefs with spock so much because he is the only one who has noticed that spock is an absolutely unhinged individual. (jim is too busy doodling <3 mr jim spock <3 all over his briefings to notice)

[lunarlivs]

pov: you’re harry being born to a bunch of 21 year olds

their thoughts and doodles below the cut <3

[muchymozzarella]

Dumbass homophobe using the RAINBOWS asdfmovie gif when the actual creator of asdfmovie and this gif is pro LGBTQ+ and donating 150% of all profits to Stonewall UK to fight against transphobia

Go check it out it's great actually

Especially this rad playmat

Check it out here! https://sharkrobot.com/collections/asdfmovie

Never forget how much the guy who made these gifs and the childhood of many millennials and Gen Zers loves and supports the LGBTQ+ community

[myartcloudsstuff]

Hottie

[plantsonplutoart]

ive been in my marauders era for 4 years now, these are just the receipts. love these boys

[dum-spiro-spero99]

THEY WOULD BE SO SO PROUD OF YOU

thanks to @pineapplecrispy for the suggestion + italian bonus, Owen WIlson bonus and historically inaccurated emo boys bonus

Other request (dm/comments)

[starlightseraph]

wilson is so obviously gay that i don’t even consider it a headcanon.

he meets women and he genuinely tries to be their friends. they pursue him, and he lets it happen. he gives them everything they want, and he never asks them to do anything for him. he doesn’t want them to even try meet any of his needs, because they can’t. then, when he realises that he’s unfulfilled, he lets other women pursue him and lets those relationships happen too, but he’s still unfulfilled. his wives and girlfriends all leave him, and he lets it happen without much of a fight because he’s not really attached to them. he canonically has problems getting it up.

he’s a completely passive non-participant in his relationships. the only person he ever fights to stay with is house. the only person he takes the initiative to leave is house. the only person he opens up to and has fun with and actually does things with is house. he actively ignores and tries to get away from his partners in favour of spending time with house. his wives blame house for breaking up their marriages and think house is a home wrecker. house constantly tries to come out as bisexual and wilson is completely in denial and just ignores it every time. he gets weirdly defensive when people assume that he and house are together.

rsl i’m sorry but you really did play the gayest little fucker in the history of television.

[emeriart]

A kiss to the sun ☀

[stareggie]

remus: men have prostates in their ass for a reason.

sirius: you used to be shy, now you’re a whore.

remus: character development.

[zegalba]

Edward James, patron of the surrealists, was so besotted with his wife, the dancer Tilly Losch, that when he saw the trail of wet footprints she left up the stairs after her bath at Monkton House, he had them woven into the carpet.

[incandescent-creativity]

Hubble’s view of the Carina Nebula, from the 2007-2009 era I think?

JWST’s view of the same nebula, July 12, 2022

[lunarlivs]

here is harry as fun kids i found on pinterest :)

[asoftepiloguemylove]

break my arms around the one i love

poem: Shauna Barbosa GPS art: @mmelodyj / unknown / Ainslie Hogarth Motherthing / Keaton St. James HISTORY STUDENT FALLS IN LOVE WITH ASTRO PHYSICS STUDENT / @555w4 / unknown / Ada Limón The Good Fight / @sunsbleeding

[myfavcharacterdidntdrown]

Regulus on the phone with James: Turn around.

Regulus: No, the other way.

Regulus: Again, the other way.

Regulus: Okay, one more time.

James: OH MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU?!

Regulus: I’m not there yet, but the thought of you aimlessly turning around in circles amuses me.

[theprongspotter]

Sirius, coming out: I don’t like women.

James, gasping: You’re a misogynist?!