Reddit Reddit reviews Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine

We found 5 Reddit comments about Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine
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5 Reddit comments about Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine:

u/ikinone · 6 pointsr/Damnthatsinteresting

It's questionable whether he had any real option to patent it, but it seems he tried to, realised he couldn't, and decided to play up the story as if he was supremely moral.

https://www.biotech-now.org/public-policy/patently-biotech/2012/01/the-real-reason-why-salk-refused-to-patent-the-polio-vaccine-a-myth-in-the-making

> As pointed out by Robert Cook-Deegan at Duke University, “When Jonas Salk asked rhetorically “Would you patent the sun?” during his famous television interview with Edward R. Murrow, he did not mention that the lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had looked into patenting the Salk Vaccine and concluded that it could not be patented because of prior art – that it would not be considered a patentable invention by standards of the day. Salk implied that the decision was a moral one, but Jane Smith, in her history of the Salk Vaccine, Patenting the Sun, notes that whether or not Salk himself believed what he said to Murrow, the idea of patenting the vaccine had been directly analyzed and the decision was made not to apply for a patent mainly because it would not result in one. We will never know whether the National Foundation on Infantile Paralysis or the University of Pittsburgh would have patented the vaccine if they could, but the simple moral interpretation often applied to this case is simply wrong.”

u/goonsack · 2 pointsr/bioethics

The book is available here for super cheap (used copies at least).

u/IanAndersonLOL · 1 pointr/todayilearned

That's not true. That didn't come into effect until 1980. It was simply because it wasn't patentable. His lawyers did look into whether or not he could actually patent it, but determined it wasn't patentable. There is a great book about Salk's life and work you can find here on amazon. His lawyers did in fact look into patenting it but determined they couldn't have because of prior art.

u/demerch2 · 1 pointr/todayilearned

A few people have pointed out that there is some debate as to whether or not this story is true. Further down in the Wikipedia article it states that "lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into the possibility of a patent, but ultimately determined that the vaccine was not a patentable invention because of prior art." The citation for this leads here, which is clearly not a first party source.

I did some more Googling (which, coincidentally, is what led me to make this post in the first place because of today's doodle) and found that all roads supporting this claim seem to lead back to this book detailing the history of the development of the polio vaccine.

I don't work for Snopes so this is as far as I'm going to go to authenticate the story, but the claim that Salk's altruism is an urban myth seems to only backed up by one book written 45 years after the fact, and thus doesn't carry enough weight for it to sway my views that this guy was a rock star in his field.

u/duckthefuck · 0 pointsr/AdviceAnimals

He couldn't patent it because it was all natural stuff. He said it would be like patenting the sun. Patenting the Sun is a biography about him, good read. http://www.amazon.com/Patenting-Sun-Polio-Salk-Vaccine/dp/0688094945