code_grey, you’re creating an absurdly unlikely scenario and then asking us what would happen in that case. What would happen in the case you propose? The sky would begin raining down money on the house of the man who invented the ray that cures cancer, and that would make him fabulously rich. That’s as likely as the situation you propose.
You’ve still got clinical studies, then. And there was still some person who was the first patient to get zapped by the miracle ray. If you didn’t go through the proper channels before that first zap, then you could and should be brought up on charges of reckless endangerment and practicing medicine without a license.
I’ll stipulate this, as an absurd hypothetical. The point others have made is that IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE.
Really. Even if Bob invented the miracle cure, he can’t do anything with it until it has been tested in clinical trials. He will need to convince a company or someone else with the resources to do this. And they won’t do it, because they get a hundred call from crackpots every day (even stipulating that Bob is not a crackpot, he will SOUND just like one when he contacts the company).
If he has the money (lots of it), he can hire a contract company, but I though we were asking what an average schmoe would do.
This is why, working at a University, I get calls from crackpots all the time. They think I will test their idea for free. I won’t.
I’d say this is the way to go about it. The lonely basement inventor just don’t have the means to undertake this all by himself.
Yes, you could license the treatment to a pharamceutical company. Except, why is the pharmaceutical company interested in the treatment? Bob can’t prove his treatment works without scientific evidence that it is safe and effective, and he can’t get that scientific evidence without a serious outlay of money.
Again, medical companies see thousands of quack treatments every day, and they ignore all of them. How does Bob differentiate himself from the quacks? He can’t unless he’s done the research. And unless he’s got some serious money to fund his research, he can’t do the research. So he’s gonna have to come up with the money on his own, because no serious company is going to fund his quack idea.
Thing is, in the invention field, ideas are a dime a dozen. Literally. Every scientist has dozens of ideas for promising lines of research that they’d love to explore, except they’d need several lifetimes and a couple truckloads of money to pursue even a fraction of them. Ideas are cheap. Turning those ideas into marketable products and/or publishable papers is hard.
Big companies spend zero time looking around for ideas to steal and turn into marketable products. They look around at successful products and try to jump on the bandwagon. They already have thousands of ideas for products, they don’t need to steal ideas from a guy in a basement. It’s when the guy in the basment is already making millions of dollars in sales from his idea that they want to steal it.