So, Who Gets to Fund Research on Malaria?

The Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have inspired close to 300 tomes and treatises since the agreement among the signatories of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) came into effect in 1995. The last word is not out yet, as the true implications of the patents and copyright regimes in developing nations (that are implementing TRIPS this year), bound to provoke more fencing among the contrarians, better known as “economists”, around the world. So far TRIPS has inspired diatribes as diverse as the scathing critique by the Professors Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite (‘Information Feudalism – Who Owns the Knowledge Economy’) who said that the patents regime had only bred a new kind of feudalism, “the beneficiary of which are the rich”, to those advocating an end to the “free ride” of the developing world on the innovations of the Rich. (After all, the bulk of the patents are owned by multinationals, who could scarcely make a dole of their R&D investments.)