On May 13, 7:42*pm, Frogwatch wrote:
On May 13, 1:24*pm, wrote:



On May 13, 12:01*pm, HK wrote:

Consider Alexander Fleming and his discovery of perhaps the world’s most
important medical advancement: Penicillin. By all accounts, Fleming was
a slob. He discovered Penicillin because he was so slovenly that some of
his Petri dishes had developed a fungus - like so many leftovers in a
bachelor’s refrigerator – and thanks to the idleness afforded him by
researching grants he was able to discern value in this. Of course he
couldn’t even manufacture a stable and useful strain of the bacteria.
Instead it was the U.S. and British governments that realized
this advancement. As a capitalist, Fleming was a failure.

Jonas Salk, another of the faces on the Mount Rushmore of medicine, was
an academic working at a university with government research money
readily available as a result of mass polio terror. He successfully
found a vaccine and promptly proceeded to refuse to patent his discovery
so that it would benefit society as thoroughly and widely as possible..
As a capitalist, he was no Andrew Carnegie.

Louis Pasteur, whose contributions to society’s health were as fearless
as they were extensive, might well have made a great capitalist. He was
bold, and precise. Had he chosen to make mousetraps I am quite sure it
would have brought mice to the brink of extinction. I would posit that
his choice not to put his formidable intellect to work amassing wealth
for himself speaks volumes about an intellectual’s relationship to
riches. It is not in society’s interest to compel every man to run the
rat race. To casually accept that only supply and demand – only greed –
can motivate the great evolutions in our history is to call Pasteur a
fool and a fraud.

Briefly, consider what market driven medicine has brought mankind: Snake
oil, heroin and The Purple Pill (ask your doctor about The Purple Pill).
Oh, and of course Ritalin and Xanax. Where would society be without the
off label uses of these capitalist ventures?

Ultimately, we must stop hailing successful capitalists as the
standard-bearers of human advancement. There are the Henry Fords and the
Bill Gateses, but there are also the Philip Morrises and the P.T.
Barnums. More importantly there are the pioneers whose lives paid little
or no heed to capitalizing and it is their names that have contributed
to the history of health care in such a way that we now consider it
reasonable to contemplate a society where patient X doesn’t necessarily
deserve to be treated for his sickness.

After all, it isn’t Polio, or Smallpox or Typhoid they can’t afford to
treat, is it?

*From KOS

Give everything you own away, then talk about greed, asshole. Oops,
forgot, Karen has it all.

Lemme see, telephones, telegraph, the transistor, the printing press,
personal computers, lightbulbs, electrical generators, most anticancer
drugs, most new antibiotics, and on and on etc.

Now for govt funded research, Nerve gas, Mustard gas, Chlorine as a
weapon, Nuclear weapons, sterilization of minorities, harvesting of
organs from political prisoners, etc.

Seems to me that the table is slanted waaaaaaaay toward good advances
being made by capitalist inventors and BAD, bad, bad inventions made
by govt. *Remember, capitalists have no interest in killing people and
govts do.

Hk is basically a doofus
and
Furthermore, consider Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite and was so
afraid it would be used for weapons that he gave away his fortune to
finance Peace Prizes and scientific prizes.

Samuel Colt invented the revolver on his own while on a transatlantic
voyage and it was said that God made all men but Sam Colt made them
equal.

Birdseye invented the method for freezing vegies without turning em
into mush on his own.

Robert Goddard invented liquid fueled rockets on his own

The Wright Bros invented on their own. The govt funded Smithsonian
funded Lilienthal's "aerodrome" that failed to fly and then refused to
give credit to the Wrights

Otto Diesel invented diesel engines on his own.

The guy who privately sequenced the human genome in 1/4 the time the
govt project said it would take at less than 1/4 the cost.

Nylon was invented privately by Dupont

Air Conditioning was invented by Dr. John Gorrie and later by Carrier
both privately.

The Bessemer process for making steel was private

Production of aluminum

Public Key Encryption, the basis of almost all internet commerce was
independently invented by a private individual AFTER it was discovered
by govt employees in england and thought to be useless and publication
was suppressed.

Westinghouse invented braking systems for trains that saved countless
lives and then went on to develop electrical equipment.

In fact, the ratio of useful inventions funded by the govt to private
funding is VERY small. Govt labs are basically a joke.
In fact, I was recently told by an employee of NIST that they have
invented NOTHING useful in the past 10 years and patent very little.

I'd have to say that private invention is very moral whereas govt
funded research tends to be focused on killing things. Inventors have
no desire to kill their customers.