A tip of the helm to the King of Fools for bringing this post to my attention. It starts out with a historical cost analysis of slavery and then makes an analogy.
Even an opponent of slavery as lukewarm as William Makepeace Thackeray had to admit, writing to a friend in England: "Every person I have talked to here about it deplores it and owns that it is the most costly domestic machinery ever devised. In a house where four servants would do with us …. there must be a dozen blacks here, and the work is not well done."
...It must all have been very frustrating to the owners. They had important things to do, and here were the lazy good-for-nothing slaves delaying and dallying and just not putting their heart and soul into it.
Now, just possibly you the reader aren't very sympathetic. Just possibly you opine that the slaveowners had only themselves to blame - “Well, of course,” you are saying, “it's no surprise that if people are forced to work for nothing then they don't bust a gut.”
So why do so many people expect these familiar laws of human behaviour to suddenly change when the time is now and the work to be done is AIDS research?
...Because the drugs companies no longer believe that they are going to get rich out of AIDS research. In fact they begin to doubt they will get any compensation at all. They read the newspapers, they study the speeches of politicians, and they sense that the popular wind is blowing against them. They think, probably rightly, that governments will either force them to sell at a loss drugs that were developed at huge expense or will bypass them and the law entirely by buying generic copies of patent drugs.
The analogy is not perfect of course. Many researchers will continue to do their best to fight AIDS for humanitarian reasons. However, given the number of medical problems facing the world (heart disease, cancer, etc.), it stands to reason that companies and individual researchers will prefer to work on equally important challenges where they might make a profit vs. challenges where they will not be allowed to profit from their work. If the problem of medical research intrigues you, I suggest you read the original Samizdata post along with the comments.