Should There be Profit in Knowledge?

Economists call goods that are non-rival and non-excludable “Public Goods.”  Importantly, this category of goods challenges the neat formula which underpins our capitalist system: market equilibriums are established by simple supply and demand  curves signaled by prices in the market. So how do you figure out market demand for a “Public Good?”

BY GEOFFREY W. SMITH
JANUARY 2, 2025

Economics & Innovation

Economics can be defined as the study of the allocation of scarce resources among people. It provides an explanation for which goods and services wind up in the hands of which people. Economics has thus traditionally thought about innovation as an allocation issue—how much resource should we allocate to innovation (as opposed to other ends) and what is the societal effect of these allocations?

Republic of Science

It has long been accepted that basic scientific research is an important precursor to technological innovation. And yet, throughout the early history of the United States, the prevailing doctrine of states' rights together with a general strain of populist anti-elitism kept the nation from realizing either Thomas Jefferson's vision of strong federal support for science through agriculture, or Alexander Hamilton's advocacy of government subsidies for the advancement of technologies to the benefit of industry.

And thus our allocations to innovation early in our history were modest at best. 

Following World War I, scientists who had worked with the Chemical Warfare Service sought to establish an institute in the private sector to apply fundamental knowledge in chemistry to problems of medicine.  

After eight years of unsuccessfully seeking a philanthropic patron or industry partner to endow such an institute, its proponents joined forces with U.S. Senator Joseph Ransdell of Louisiana  to seek federal sponsorship for their efforts.  

Following a protracted political campaign that lasted more than four additional years and crossed two presidential administrations, the Ransdell Act was passed in 1930 with support from President Hoover and Congress due largely to a then recent influenza crisis as well as a growing interest in cancer research.

The Ransdell Act achieved two things:

  1. The renaming of the Hygienic Laboratory as the National Institute of Health, and
  2. For the first time ever, the provision of government funding for basic biomedical research.
U.S. Senator Joseph Ransdell, D-Louisiana

U.S. Senator Joseph Ransdell, D-Louisiana

The National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, 1940

The National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, 1940

Even though the government was in the midst of the Depression in 1930 and thus financially strapped, it stepped in where the private market (industry or philanthropy) had failed to fund.1

1

Note that from this very first funding authorization, though, scientists were in a position to complain about the under-allocation of resources to their pursuits— having sought $15 million in funding, only $750,000 was authorized.

This legislation marked a sea-change in the attitude of both the U.S. political community and the scientific community toward the public funding of medical research. The change in attitude was so swift and profound that when the National Cancer Institute Act came up for a vote in 1937, it passed both houses of Congress unanimously.

In the period following World War II, science entered a kind of golden age, and was increasingly at the center of much of modern life—new medicines such as penicillin improved life; technologies such as radar and synthetic rubber led to trips to outer space and eventually the Moon thereby inspiring young minds.

And the explicit view that science and innovation were crucial to our society became embedded in an implicit social contract supporting science that was struck after the end of the war—the public will fund universities to do research, and the private sector will benefit from the dissemination of the results of this research.

This “deal” was famously set forth by Vannevar Bush. Bush had been the Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, the founder of Raytheon, and then during and immediately following World War II, he directed the United States’ national R&D effort. In his well-known 1945 report, “Science, The Endless Frontier,” Bush argued successfully that the public needed to fund science and thus innovation because

“[Innovation] when put to practical use mean[s] more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past.”

This canonical answer to the question “why innovation?” has thus persisted since at  least the end of World War II:

“that the fostering and harnessing of novelty would create value, improve our quality of life, restore and prolong health, and provide security to society and growth to communities.” 2

2

E. R. Edelman, M. B. Leon, The fiber of modern society. Sci. Transl. Med. 3, 89cm14 (2011).

The public funding mechanism promoted by Bush came together with the normative  structure of science to create what Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian-British scientist and 3 polymath, called “The Republic of Science:”

“Society strives towards an unknown future, which it believes to be accessible and worth achieving. In the case of scientists, the explorers strive towards a hidden reality, for the sake of intellectual satisfaction. And as they satisfy themselves, they enlighten all men and are thus helping society to fulfill its obligation towards intellectual self-improvement.”

1

Note that from this very first funding authorization, though, scientists were in a position to complain about the under-allocation of resources to their pursuits—  having sought $15 million in funding, only $750,000 was authorized.  

2

E. R. Edelman, M. B. Leon, The fiber of modern society. Sci. Transl. Med. 3, 89cm14 (2011).  

Vannevar Bush, 1940

Vannevar Bush, 1940

The USDA's penicillin research team, 1944

The USDA's penicillin research team, 1944

Testing synthetic rubber, 1944

Testing synthetic rubber, 1944

Public Goods

All of which was, of course, quite great.  

Except that there is an odd quirk in economics that leads to a problem. The quirk  involves goods such as basic scientific knowledge, clean air, public parks, national  defense, and, most famously, as identified by the economist Ronald Coase, light from  lighthouses.

What all these goods have in common is that they are:

a) Non-rival: one person consuming them does not stop another person  consuming them, and  

b) Non-excludable: if one person can consume them, it is impossible to stop  another person from consuming them.

Economists call goods that are non-rival and non-excludable “Public Goods.”  Importantly, this category of goods challenges the neat formula which underpins our capitalist system: market equilibriums are established by simple supply and demand  curves signaled by prices in the market.

So how do you figure out market demand for a “Public Good?”  

Let’s use Coase’s “Light from a Lighthouse” as our example of such a good.  

If “Light from a Lighthouse” was a typical private good, then it would be rival (once  you saw the light it would be gone and no one else could see it) and excludable (once  you bought the light, you would own it, and could stop other people from seeing it).

Rivalry in consumption is what makes market pricing systems so incredibly effective, and why Adam Smith’s invisible hand hypothesis can work. A price is a per unit charge for a good (e.g., Light from a Lighthouse), such that, when goods are consumed away due to a rivalry between consumers, supply shortages will tend to correct the market by driving up prices as consumers compete for the few remaining goods. Similarly, a supply surplus will cause firms to lower the price of the good until an equilibrium is met that will clear the market.

Once a lighthouse has been built and its lamp turned on, though, its light becomes a Public Good—a thousand boats could sail by and see the light and it would not be used up, and all those boats could consume the light whether or not they had chipped in to build the lighthouse.

Since a Public Good can be shared in essence infinitely, no additional units of the good need to be produced following the first such unit to satisfy the demand of the market. For public goods then, market price is no longer an efficient mechanism to govern supply and demand because the stock of a public good is never “consumed away” and thus prices cannot adjust dynamically to control the ebb and flow of supply and demand.

Economics 101: Supply & Demand / How Efficient Markets work

Economics 101: Supply & Demand / How Efficient Markets work

The economic inefficiencies of public goods

The economic inefficiencies of public goods

Scientific Knowledge as a Public Good

Scientific knowledge is a particular type of Public Good (or at least many economists  assume so).

When considering the case of scientific knowledge in particular as a “Public Good,”  economists identify two additional characteristics that are important beyond being  non-rival and non-excludable:  

1. It is a durable good, that is it is not destroyed or altered by its use. Even  better, the more it is used the more its value increases because the application  of knowledge proves its validity and widens the scope of its applications  (“network effect”).  

2. The production of scientific knowledge is uncertain—in the most extreme  cases it is impossible to predict either results or their usefulness.

In addition to the market failure described above, another form of market failure  encumbers the production of basic scientific knowledge: transactional spill-over.  

What happens if you try to trade basic scientific knowledge in an open market?—  

A rational buyer of a piece of scientific knowledge, just like a rational buyer of a  car or a stock, would first want to know something about what it is that they will  be getting for their money.  

If deal falls through, the potential buyer gains some knowledge about the idea—this is known by economists as a “transactional spill-over.”

Findings of scientific research being new knowledge would be seriously undervalued were they sold through a perfectly competitive market because  either the seller reveals too little about the idea (to protect against spill-over), and the buyer thus undervalues it; or, the seller reveals too much about the idea,  and the buyer has not need to pay for it at all.

So, again, markets fail to property account for scientific knowledge as finding the optimal balance between disclosure and non-disclosure is very difficult.

Markets for Public Goods fail for a third reason. Consider:

  1. Merck funds basic research and publishes results.
  2. Pfizer does not fund basic research, but reads Merck’s results.
  3. Because it did not spend money on the basic research, Pfizer has more  money available to commercialize (profit from) the research it did not  fund.
  4. Pfizer’s stock price goes up, Merck’s goes down.
  5. Merck stops funding basic research.
  6. Society has a problem …

The lack of incentive for individuals or firms to contribute to a Public Good is known  as a free-rider problem. The term refers to the individuals / organizations who consume more than their fair share of a resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs  of its production thereby taking a “free-ride” on the contributions of others. There are  two key aspects of the free rider problem:

First, the individual incentive to contribute to a Public Good is reduced by the  contributions of others, and thus individual contributions tend to be smaller when the  group is larger. Put another way, the size of the free-rider problem grows as a  community grows larger.

Second, as the community grows larger, the optimal size of the Public Good grows. The market failure under voluntary contributions is greater the larger is the  community.

The combination of the characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability means  that it can be hard to get people to pay to consume Public Goods, so they will be  underproduced, or perhaps may not be produced at all if left to simple market forces.

As a means of allocation "Public Goods", markets tend to fail.

Economic Solution: Subsidies

There are a variety of ways that we can seek to correct the market failure and support  the production of Public Goods.

Private philanthropy is one common category of subsidization. But two forms of  government intervention are perhaps the most consequential levers.  

The most direct form of government intervention is through the use of public  resources (i.e., tax revenues) to close the gap between what the private market will  fund and what is perceived to be socially optimal. Viewed in this way, the NIH and NSF  budgets are tax-funded subsidies for the creation of scientific knowledge.  

The other major form of government intervention is the one mentioned by the U.S.  Constitution—the creation of a system by which a “Public Good” can be  transformed into a private good (rival, excludable) by the granting of a patent.  

Patents allow exclusive possession of the economic benefits derived from scientific  knowledge for a defined period of time, thereby allowing ideas to be converted into  property rights that will trade efficiently in an open market system.

We will come back to patents again in a moment.

Collective Creativity

In light of these market failures related to Public Goods, one interesting thing to note  is that in many ways The Republic of Science was to function effectively by in essence  mirroring the methods of free economic markets.

By adjusting their individual efforts to the results achieved and openly published by  others, scientists were mutually able to efficiently coordinate progress while  maintaining their individual interests and projects.

One can analogize the process to putting together a jigsaw puzzle—in order to put it  together in the most efficient manner, you would recruit helpers and divide up the  pieces. If each person was left to just focus on their pieces, unlikely they would fit  together and unlikely to speed things up beyond what a single individual could. But, if  you let the helpers work on their pieces in sight of all the others, each helper will act  on his own pieces while responding to the progress of the others. The joint task ends  up being greatly accelerated.

The co-ordination of the puzzle builders is guided by an “invisible hand”. And the  entire science enterprise moves forward by a network of overlapping spheres of  interest that connect physics to chemistry to biology and beyond.

In order for this system of co-ordination by mutual adjustment to work, wide and open sharing of information is required—

In the free economic market, the system of prices causes supply to dynamically adjust  to meet demand, but only if the prices are known.

In the Republic of Science, the system of open publication of new knowledge  notionally allows the market to move forward. Particularly, the argument goes, when  so much of scientific progress occurs by unpredictable steps that may be driven by  ideas produced by others.

Consider the effect which the isolation of scientists would have on the progress of  science.

Each scientist would go on for a while developing problems derived from the  information initially available to all. But these problems would eventualy be  exhausted, and in the absence of further information about the results achieved by  others, new problems of any value would cease to arise, and scientific progress would  come to a standstill.

In the absence of the open sharing of information, the world of science begins to look  like our current understanding of the universe, pulling apart at great speed until each  galaxy is left in cold and quiet isolation.

1980

In 1980, on the 50th anniversary of the Ransdell Act beginning the rise of publicly funded research:

  • The annual budget of the NIH grew from $750,000 to $3 billion;
  • Every year during this period the Federal government outspent private industry on  R&D; and
  • The U.S. government built up a stockpile of approximately 30,000 patents from the  work done with these dollars.

The prevailing philosophy at this time with respect to scientific knowledge was that if  the federal government paid for it, both it should be shared with the public and the  federal government should owned it if it was reduced to the form of a patent. But, at  the same time, US private industry was facing severe competition from foreign  companies and there was a political concern that the US was losing its competitive edge.

As an example, critics pointed to the fact that only 5% of government-owned patents had actually been licensed for commercial use. Neither the Republic of Science in the  form of universities or individual researchers, nor its patron the federal government  could capture market value from its work because of the imperative to freely share the  knowledge the Republic produced.

This should not come as much of a surprise at this point as it is the classic economic  problem of a “Public Good” (non-rival and non-excludable), even with some of these goods converted into patents (because the government proved to not be very good at  extracting value from them).

In response to this perceived market failure, the federal government sought to change  the social contract with the Republic of Science. The governmental policy shift was  encompassed in a range of actions by each branch of the government which  collectively produced a profound change in the commercial orientation of US  scientists and the institutions where they worked.

Key legislative actions included:

Bayh-Dole Act (1980)

Perhaps the most influential piece of the privatization movement was the  University and Small Business Patent Procedure Act, better known as the Bayh Dole Act. The objectives of Bayh-Dole were two-fold:

1.) to “use the patent system to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research”, and

2.) to “promote collaboration between commercial concerns and nonprofit organizations, including universities.”

The mechanism of action for the Bayh-Dole Act was to give U.S. universities  and researchers the right to:  

1.) Patent discoveries funded with public dollars, and  

2.) License those patents to industry for a profit.

With this one act, the profit motive of rival, excludable goods had been  introduced directly into the Republic of Science.

Stevenson-Wydler Act Technology Innovation Act (1980)

Encouraged federal agencies and laboratories to facilitate transfer of  technology to the private sector through the creation of Offices of Research and Technology (0.5% of each federal agency budget was to go an ORTA) that could administer agreements such as Cooperative Research and Development Agreements.

R&D Tax Credit (1981)

Designed to stimulate company R&D over time by reducing after-tax costs.  Specifically, companies that qualify for the credit could deduct from corporate  income taxes an amount equal to 20 percent of qualified research expenses  above a base amount. The goal of the credit was to encourage industry to  invest more on long-term R&D.

Small Business Innovation Development Act (1982)

Established the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program within  major federal agencies to fund promising research being done by small businesses.

Orphan Drug Act (1983)

An orphan or rare disease is defined as a condition that is diagnosed by fewer  than 200,000 individuals in the US. In aggregate, an estimated 25+ million  Americans have an orphan disease. The act provides for, among other things,  seven-year marketing exclusivity on drugs treating orphan diseases (this longer  period of exclusivity is designed to encourage more companies to invest money  in research on these conditions), FDA regulatory path relief (to solve the  problem that it is difficult to run a large clinical trial if only a small number of  patients exist), and tax reductions.

From the judicial branch came one organizational development and one crucial  judicial ruling:

US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (1982)

Was established and provided nationwide jurisdiction over patent appeal  cases. This created for the first time a judicial body with particular expertise in  important questions of intellectual property law.

Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980)

For the realm of life sciences, the Supreme Court added a turbo charge to the  policy and objectives of the Bayh-Dole Act with its ruling in this landmark case.

Genetic engineer Ananda Chakrabarty, working for General Electric, had  developed a bacterium that was capable of breaking down crude oil which he  proposed to use in treating oil spills. He requested a patent for the bacterium from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), but he was turned down by  a patent examiner because the law dictated that living things were not  patentable. Chakrabarty sued the USPTO (Diamond was the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks at the time).

The case worked its way through the judicial system finally reaching the  Supreme Court. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the opinion for the Supreme  Court and stated:

“The question before us in this case is a narrow one of statutory interpretation requiring us to construe 35 U. S. C. §101, which provides:  ‍


Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.


Specifically, we must determine whether respondent’s microorganism constitutes a “manufacture” or “composition of matter” within the meaning of the statute.”  ‍

In a 5–4 ruling (with Justices Stewart, Blackmun, Rehnquist, and Stevens  joining the Chief Justice in the majority), the court ruled in favor of Chakrabarty,  and upheld the patent, writing:

“the relevant distinction [in patentability] is not between living and inanimate things, but whether living products could be seen as ‘human made inventions.’”

Allowing a patent on a life form proved to be a slippery slope, on the basis of Chakrabarty, in 1985, the USPTO ruled that genetically engineered or altered  plants are patentable, and in 1987, the USPTO extended patenting to all altered  or engineered animals. Within a few years, microbes, plants, animals, human  cells, cell lines, and genes were routinely and in volume being patented.

And finally an executive action that sought to create a more robust intellectual  property framework for the country was:

US Patent & Trademark Office Fee-for-Service Program (1991)

Since 1991, USPTO has been fully funded by application fees and maintenance fees that patent holders must pay after 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years from the date of any patent.

U.S. Senators Birch Bayh, D-Indiana, & Bob Dole, R-Kansas

U.S. Senators Birch Bayh, D-Indiana, & Bob Dole, R-Kansas

Ananda Chakrabarty outside the U.S. Supreme Court

Ananda Chakrabarty outside the U.S. Supreme Court

Regime of Technology

The combined effects of this package of privatization moves made by the federal  government help lead to the rise of a “Regime of Technology” right in the midst of the  Republic of Science.

The Regime was designed to and focused on maximizing private profit from federally funded scientific knowledge as a way to unlock the investment in research made by  the government—and in response to the failure of the market to capitalize on the knowledge while it was simply codified in the form of a “Public Good”.

The Republic was being stormed—the science commons was being fenced, information was no longer as free to travel across the land, and since the Republic was based on normative behavior, the norms could change over time. The norms of the Regime of Technology are in many ways the anti-norms of the Republic of Science:

Rather than communalism, private property;

Rather than disinterestedness, interestedness—results are viewed and presented to support a particular point of view in support of private property;

Originality may be OK, but it is often better to be a follower and let others take the risk  of being original; and

Rather than skepticism, credulity—there is a great need to believe in order to  convince investors and consumers to provide support.


Whatever you think of these normative arguments, the Regime looked on favorably as  Bayh-Dole, Chakrabarty, and the other policy changes noted above unleashed a flood  of new patents, new companies, and new products — and a shift to private industry  funding a larger amount of R&D than the federal government each year.

Academic-Industrial Complex

In our tale of the Republic of Science and the Regime of Technology, after 95 years of  significant funding of R&D by the federal government, and after 45 years of  universities and other organizations being able to profit from federally-supported  research, the Regime of Technology seems to have things firmly in hand.

In many ways, the partnership between academia and the government around the  production of scientific knowledge which began with the Ransdall Act has been  annexed as subsidiary of private industry. With the government to fund academia in  the creation of increasingly applied (mission-centric) scientific knowledge (rather  than basic scientific knowledge), which is then appropriated (albeit for a licensing  fee) by industry who can reap huge private profits from this scheme.

In this conception of the current system, commercial interests driven by the  government as well as industry have changed university research from a publicly funded enterprise performed in order to subsidize the creation of scientific  knowledge as a Public Good and undertaken with the Mertonian norms of skepticism, disinterestedness and communalism in the forefront, into one pursued in a far less open manner often primarily to meet the goals of the economic market, which is to say, monetary gain.

In a science world driven almost entirely by applied outcomes, monopoly rights  through patents and secrecy as a necessary precursor to the filing of such patents  can lead to socially unappealing outcomes:

Intellectual property-based solutions saddle society with the inefficiencies that  arise when monopolies (if time-bounded ones created by patents) are tolerated;  these are referred to by economists as the “dead-weight burden of monopoly.”

Secrecy practices to protect investments in R&D driven by the methodologies of  implementing IP rights (i.e., first to file an idea is given a patent, even if someone  else had invented it earlier) create inefficiency in sharing and transfer of  knowledge—thus reducing societies ability to efficiently and effectively use its  exiting body of knowledge.


Perhaps more troubling in a world ruled by the Regime of Technology:

Less commercially-oriented areas of science languish;

Ideas that have no obvious and immediate commercial value often are not to be  pursued; and

Data is increasingly at risk of being manipulated to serve commercial, rather  than truth-seeking, ends.

Republic of Science Redux

So, what remains of the Republic of Science? Is it just a fairy tale from a world that no  longer exists? Has it truly been subsumed by a Regime of Technology?

To recap the argument a bit:

The Republic of Science is about maximizing the rate of growth of our common  stock of knowledge for which purposes public knowledge (a “Public Good”) and hence patronage or public subsidization of scientists is required, because citizens of the Republic of Science cannot capture the social surplus value that their work will yield if they freely share all the knowledge they obtain.

The Regime of Technology is geared to maximizing private gain corresponding to  the current and future flows of private profits from existing knowledge and it  therefore requires the control of such knowledge through secrecy or exclusive possession of the right to its commercial exploitation.


Juxtaposed to each other like this, I would argue that rather than trying to find ways to make these two worlds collaborate which has been the trend over recent times, we  should in fact be focused on maintaining institutional and cultural separation of the realms.

The lure / power of funding from the Regime of Technology will always be strong and the need to migrate knowledge from the Republic outward will also persist.

But what is much harder to protect and promote is the nurturing of non-purely commercial but deeply impactful “Public Good”-based solutions to key societal  problems.

I think that more critical in the long run than commercial spin-offs from exploratory  science programs are the cumulative indirect effects of these programs in raising the  rate of return on private investment in proprietary R&D performed by businesses.

In fact, an alternative explanation had been posed for the rise of private R&D funding  beginning in the 1980s is that rather than being a response to government policy  changes, it represents an ongoing private investment in “spillover” knowledge  generated during the reign of the Republic of Science.

Over time, basic scientific knowledge will raise the rates of return and reduce the  riskiness of investing in applied R&D—which is in fact what private stockholders are  looking for. The central point that must be emphasized here is that, over the long-run,  the fundamental knowledge and practical techniques developed in the pursuit of basic science serves to keep applied R&D as a profitable investment area. These are the characteristics of durability and uncertainty that we touched on briefly earlier.

Mechanism Design Theory

In order to ensure the survival of the Republic of Science, we must maintain our  support for the notion of science as a “Public Good” both in the economist’s sense of  the phrase and in the common sense of the phrase — a good that has clear value to  society and thus deserves to be subsidized in order to ensure its production at a  socially optimal level.

In 2007, Leo Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson won the Nobel Prize in  Economics for their work on an area know as Mechanism Design Theory. The rather clunkily named Mechanism Design Theory involves how to structure economic  incentives and institutions to enhance social welfare. It is often described as the  “reverse engineering part of economics” as the starting point is an outcome that is being sought, like more scientific research, a more equitable distribution of income, or better funding for education. Then, one works to design a system that aligns private  incentive with public goals.

In taking this view, there are specific things that we could do to support the Republic  of Science in its traditional mode as a producer of scientific knowledge:

1) Focus public funding on the right science

How: Simply put, the government should be funding that which industry won’t. Thus, reduce government funding of applied research (which industry should fund in any  case), while increasing funding of non-mission oriented, basic research—not by reducing the number of dollars appropriated to science, but rather by re-orienting the existing pie to core disciplines such as chemistry, physics, and math, in addition to biology.

The benefit of the spillover of knowledge should be enough over time to fulfill the  needs of the ROI crowd. This approach will also help to shift academia back toward  the norms described by Merton and away from the challenges of managing being a  “partner with industry.”

2) Support (and in fact demand) the open pursuit of science

How: breakdown the power of the for-profit publication industry and more widely  disseminate scientific knowledge on an open basis.

3) Limit intellectual property rights

How #1: end the granting of patents (monopolies) on certain basic knowledge such as  research tools and techniques.

How #2: provide automatic “fair use” exemptions from the force of IP law to all those  engaged in non-commercial scientific research and teaching.

How #3: raise the novelty requirements for patents and award protection only for  narrower claims.

How #4: universities could require as part of their basic licensing agreements that  licensees make the patent, improvements to the patent, and other related works  available to markets that they otherwise would not pursue. (In fact a student-led  group called Universities Allied for Essential Medicines has done just this by creating  an Equitable or Global Access License).

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