Normally, economists talk about trade-offs: weaker intellectual-property rights, it is argued, would undermine incentives to innovate. The irony here is that Myriad’s discovery would have been made in any case, owing to a publicly funded, international effort to decode the entire human genome that was a singular achievement of modern science.
这是一个尤其尖锐的案件。通常，经济学家们会谈论权衡：他们认为较弱势的知识产权保障会减弱对创新的激励。然而讽刺地是，就算麦利亚德公司没有研究出这种测试来，由于公共资助的对整个人类基因组解码的国际性努力——这是现代科学的非凡成就，人们迟早都会有所发现。而麦利亚德公司只不过是把这个发现稍微提早了一点，却因其无情追求经济利润所的行为削弱了这两个基因的社会效益。