Patents, Biomedical Research. And Treatments: Examining Concerns, Canvassing Solutions‪.‬

On April 12, 1955, after eight years of research and testing, Jonas Salk announced that his polio vaccine was safe, effective, and potent. The 1916 polio outbreak had left six thousand Americans dead and another twenty-seven thousand paralyzed. In the two years following vaccine release, polio cases in the United States dropped by approximately 90 percent. By 1979 no cases of polio from the wild polio virus were reported nationwide. (1) The immediate positive effect of Salk's research on the lives of thousands of Americans is uncontested. Yet despite its enormous success, the vaccine was not patented. When asked who owned the patent, Salk famously responded: "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" (2) Salk's explanation for not patenting the polio vaccine would probably not convince a court of law--while he is right that no one can patent the sun, he may have been able to obtain a patent on the vaccine (neither he, his employer, nor the funder of the research ever applied for one). But it can still be assessed as an ethical argument--that no one should patent the vaccine because it should belong to everyone, just as the sun does. His argument might have been based on a belief that a patent would have had bad consequences--that it would have impeded access to the vaccine, or that, as a moral principle, certain important, lifesaving discoveries should be placed in the public domain.