Okay say someone worked on a cure for AIDS/Cancer in the basement and they find a all natural cure for it, one pill and you’re cured. Now this person is a greedy SOB and he decides it’s worth two million a pill and you must take it in his presence so the secret never gets out. He makes no claims as to effectiveness to keep out the FDA but people with cancer/AIDS have went to the doctor after treatment and have been found completely cured. He has threatened to destroy the pill and the secret formula if they try to force him to show it to the medical community because he wants to make all the money himself.
Apart from being a bastard can this person be forced to share his secret by a law, which law?
A bit of what you describe is already going on. There are drugs out there that can prolong lives of people with AIDS, they were created by giant corporations and sold for very high prices that not everyone in the first wolrd, much less sub-saharan africa could afford.
The corporations wouldn’t discount the drugs, so the poor countries that couldn’t afford them stole the formulas and started manufacturing them on their own in violation of international patent/intellectual property laws. Fortunately there has been more dialog between the pharma companies and the poor countires goverments recently, some companies just allowed their drugs to be manufactured, others set up discounts, so there has been some improvement.
But basically if your people are dying and someone else has the cure they won’t share on terms you can accept the solution appears to be either diplomacy or theft, not many laws invoved in it as of yet.
No existing law that I’m aware of, except maybe a food-ingredients labeling statute.
One could probably be written, though. Congress (or individual states) could regulate food supplements beyond the point where they do now.
Alternatively, price controls or limits have been used in some circumstances before. A $500 per dose price limit on drug or “natural supplement” pills would pretty much solve the problem.
2 million per pill sounds like a bit much. A really quick and dirty back of the envelope calculation says that would be paying a bit more per QALY gained than what most health care systems are willing to pay to save a persons life.
At which point the creator of the cure would destroy it in the scenario outlined in the OP. So surely the public wouldn’t clamor for a legislation to be passed that will result in the destruction of the cure?
The OP scenario said the inventor would destroy the formula if he were forced to turn it over, because he wants to keep all the money for himself.
Some of the laws that have been proposed would not force the inventor to turn anything over. (For example, the per-pill cap. Let’s say the new law capped the price at $5000 per dose. He still stands to make a boatload of money. )
Well the OP specified “pill” so what would stop a patient from taking the pill, then promptly regurgitating it as soon as possible. Kind of gross, but it might be feasible. Of course he could watch them take the pill and make them wait in his presence for a few hours.
Also, although this is not at all legit but could his purchases not be monitored and the “recipe” derived from that.
Don’t hold your breath for this one. IF he did, and that is a big IF. There would be another come along in a relatively short time, make his cure public.
He would undersell the upatented cure and sink his ship.
There have been many instances where nearly identical products have been invented nearly simultaneously.
Old Chinese proverb: “What one fool can do another can.”