this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Devial@discuss.online 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If he wanted it to be freely available, why did he even sell the patent ? Just disclaim at the patent office. Selling is just asking the new holder to start enforcing.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 35 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They sold the patent to the University of Toronto, so they didn't exactly sell it to a for-profit patent troll.

But also, that was in 1923, so the patent has long since expired.

[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 35 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

They also don't make insulin the way that he did back then. Not justifying the price hike cause the way its made now is way cheaper than it was with the old method (which was basically grinding up animal parts to extract insulin). These fucks are just profiting off of the suffering of Americans who have literally no choice but to use their drug.

https://youtu.be/naqbi_qVoVY

[–] Devial@discuss.online 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean, that's better than selling to a private person, still feels weird, since disclaiming a patent is absolutely possible, and has a 100% chance of leading to the desired outcome, vs whatever small chance there may be that the University starts taking profits on it. Or even just sees themselves forced to sell the patent, because of potential financial issues.

Yeah, the risk is small, but eliminating it in it's entirety would've been easily possible, so it just feels a bit weird he didn't do it.

[–] core@leminal.space 1 points 2 hours ago

I never heard of disclaiming a patent until just now. Maybe he didn't know about or it didn't exiat in the 1920's