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sorry, wonder, but to my mind your arguments hold no water whatsoever. in fact, you even went so far as to recapitulate one of my arguments against the article you posted--maybe read through the post again and you will find it.
i know a couple of researchers who work on cancer treatment drugs for a major pharmaceutical corporations. i also know academic researchers. there is a considerable amount of information sharing, such that it becomes really quite difficult to say where the particular logics that researchers pursue come from--private? public? both at once?....private firms are more likely to consider important research proprietary and therefore do not share the information...which would seem a problem in the arena of socientific research, wouldnt it? particularly given that the private-firm research leans on academic research, track of which is given in publications--and behind that lay state funding, the whole tangle of grants, university funding, etc etc etc,
the illusion of the private sector having a monopoly on creativity is simply wrong the other posts before this one have also made that argument.
the absurd reduction of motive to self-interest is patronizing in fact and completely indefensible in principle.
the researcher i know work from any number of motives--some of them in private firms actually think that it would be beneficial to human beings in general if cancer could be cured, would be beneficial to humanity in general if aids could be treated or cured effectively and cheaply, and actually work with this kind of motivation in mind. they made choices about where to work based on considerations involving the exact kind of work they decided would help bring about the desired ends--knowing full well that this calculation rested on top of a much more diffuse body of information from a wide range of institutional sources.
gee think of that---people actually diverting their lives in a particular direction because they imagine that a greater social good could be achieved through their efforts--in tandem with those of others. my acquaintances in this area are deeply ambivalent about the relation of their own work to the profit machinery of the corporations they work for, and talk quite openly about arguments that run entirely counter to everything in the idiotic article that opened the thread--they argue for humanitarian concerns putting a brake on corporate profits, limitations on property claims for drugs, and expanded notion of public domain, etc. they also talk about these being drugs in a particular sector that could be considered as seperate legal entities, and that the companies would not suddenly stop producing drugs if these were put into the public domain--it might even be good advertising for the corporations to do things like that because it would increase their symbolic capital.
of course, not a bit of this could possibly figure into the one-dimensional analysis in the article, nor in the conceptual position that subtends it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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