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