A Gift to Humanity

'It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit'. Harry Truman.

One of the key barriers to rapid adoption of something new, no matter how beneficial to mankind, is who holds the rights to it. These days, everyone wants to patent their thing. We have strong remedies to treat AIDS patients. We have innovative technologies to reduce energy consumption or generate more in a sustainable way. And so on. But the patent owners are there, lined up, lobbying and marketing, waiting for their big pay day. Or worse, sometimes patents are acquired for defensive reasons because they threaten established, typically noxious industries, only to slow progress or adoption.

For anyone who's watched Food, Inc. you know companies like Monsanto have built huge lucrative monopolies on the back of patented seeds that farmers are pretty much obligated to use. The corn you buy in the supermarket will likely soon come with a trademark on it.

What if I stumble onto a cure for cancer tomorrow? Or discover a way to harness the power of the sun at a hundredth of the cost of methods known today? Or devise a way to provide food and clean water to the whole world in an environmentally sustainable and cost effective way? Should I be allowed to profit from that? To somehow restrict access to my invention only to those who are able to pay for it? At what point does an invention become of such public utility that it should belong to all of humanity? I'm all for rewarding innovation and hard work, but there are limits. Especially when lives are at stake. This is where Eminent Domain should come in. Rather than spend hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out moribund financial instutions, let's use public funds to acquire the rights to key medical, technological and environmental inventions. And then turn them over freely to the entire world. I bet the ROI on this investment would be off the charts!!

Talk about a different war on terror. Imagine the headlines in Gaza or Kabul or Islamabad if the USA made such a gift to the world. If our message was that we would use our might and our money not to send bombs and soldiers across borders, but doctors and architects and engineers with unrestricted access to the inventions needed to improve the lives of populations everywhere.

As John Lennon so rightly said: You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.

Peace...