Opinion: Insulin: a case study for why we need a public option in the pharmaceutical industry
When Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip filed for a U.S. patent on insulin in 1923 and sold it to the University of Toronto for $1 each, they did it because, as Best once said, “insulin belongs to the world.”
They also believed that securing the patent was a form of publication, and wrote to the university president, “When the details of the method of preparation are published anyone would be free to prepare the extract, but no one could secure a profitable monopoly.”
Sadly, they were mistaken.
Today, three companies — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi Aventis — control virtually the entire, charges exorbitant amounts for a medicine that people with type 1 diabetes cannot live without. Since the 1990s, they have raised the price of insulin .
