Should Medical Discoveries be Paid for?

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 257, 26 July 1930, Page 21

Should Medical Discoveries be Paid for?

— — OTHING can be more certain than that the public will examine I with sympathetic interest the proposal put forward by the British Medical Association for a system under which doctors A v will be able to some extent to profit from any discoveries they may make in the field of medical science,” says the “Evening Standard” of London. “The record of the profession in this respect has been exceedingly honourable, and, indeed, more than honourable. “Its members have devoted their time and their money, very often their health, and even life itself, to the advancement of the healing art, knowing very well that their own self-imposed rules would prevent them from reaping the benefit that accrues to an inventor in any other branch of science,” adds the “Standard.” “Their attitude has been dictated partly by the fine scientific tradition of publicity. Scientists engaged in pure research regard themselves all the world over as members of a community, and it is what the community produces that matters, not the individual. Therefore, when a new scrap of knowledge falls into the hands of an individual, he looks on it as common property.

“The medical profession, we say, shares this attitude. It also realises that those who stand between mankind and disease or death occupy a special position and have special responsibilities. What they do can never be reckoned entirely in terms of money, nor have they ever attempted so to reckon it. They realise that it would be intolerable were the art of healing to stand on a purely financial basis.

“But it is surely irrational to deny to the investigator what is granted to the merely executive physician or surgeon. What the investigator does often cannot, to be sure, be calculated in terms of money. How could we adequately pay those early explorers into the unknown domain of the X-rays, so many of whom have died at last of an agonising disease? What adequate reward could be made to Sir Ronald Ross, whose researches into the origin of malaria have changed the character of a substantial part of the globe? “These facts are so obvious that we think the British Medical Association can proceed with its scheme in the full assurance that the public will be anxious to approve of it, if it seems to be workable. “It is asking no more than a just reward for its services, and we do not for one moment believe that the public will hesitate to grant that reward. It will, in fact, probably feel easier in its conscience when it has done so.”