Medical Ethics

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be with held.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Your recent editorial on the drinker Respirator suit failed to make wholly clear the principal point oat issue. The question is whether universities shall allow their professors to use for private gain scientific and medical discoveries made under the university auspices, on tax-free premises. The problem is of wise importance, for it confronts not Harvard alone, but all the great universities and research foundations of the country.

Aside from the injustice to those who support educational institutions, the private patenting of scientific and medical discoveries has been criticized on another valid ground. Achievement in this line are almost invariably the result of years of study by many different researchers, working often far separated in locality and time. Scientists pool their knowledge, publishing freely the steps of their progress. The one among them, therefore, who supplies the culminating factor in a great discovery is luckier, but not necessarily more worthy of credit, than all the rest.

The doctor's code of ethics has long insisted that important medic la discoveries should be kept free to benefit all people. Under the circumstances, it is surprising to find that an Associate Professor in the Harvard School of Public Health should have patented his contribution to the long history of respirator development. It is even more surprising that he should have seen fit to accept royalties for the monopoly of this lifesaving device, which he had transferred to Warren E. Collins, Inc. The transaction suggests a distinct flare for business in this Medical School teacher, inasmuch as he had done his research in the tax-free Medical School shop and had received his Harvard salary and a subsidy from the Consolidated Gas Company of New York as well, before the royalties began to come in.

The coming patent suit, Collins vs. J. II. Emerson, is a striking example of the public injury that can arise from the policy mentioned above, of allowing university instructors to monopolize discoveries for their private gain. If Collins wins the suit, the public may be deprived of a life-saving apparatus considered by competent authorities to be better than the "Drinker Respirator" and selling at a price $500.00 lower. It is because the case is so clear as a test of the principles involved that it is attracting wide attention. David L. Garrison '28.