That's what they said about indoor plumbing, air conditioning ect. Yea new technology is expensive to start. Should people not work on anything that cannot be made available cheaply from the get go.
Plumbing... I see more and more pvc and quick-connect fittings, and central manifold setups. Plus the robots that can print a house and install all the pipes in one day. It's all becoming modular.
I was a little sad for my plumber friend, but he isn't. He said, that at first this was a DYI build-you-own-house kind of thing, so customers he never had. Now, he is dealing with people who bought those houses, and even if it is quick and easy to fix, they don't want to or don't know how to deal with that. In addition, it takes him no time at all to do those repairs he can actually do more jobs during a day. So he is not losing any income, or sleep.
Marginal costs may be small, but the initial costs are large. Once the initial costs get repaid, and as third parties reverse-engineer the process, the price of the treatment will drop.
In a free-market R&D ecosystem, sure. The issue is, do we want that to be how it works. And its debatable how much of the initial cost should be loaded onto this cure, as the work builds on other work, and the technique will produce more interesting results in future.
And in this case, does it boil do to publishing the dna fragment? Is this another 'patenting a number' discussion?
I don't feel we want that to be how it works, but I also have no good ideas of how it could work differently, while retaining the speed of discoveries.
