Sunday, July 20, 2003

LEGISLATION FOR MEDICARE COULD RESULT IN COMPULSORY LICENSING OF PATENTS ABROAD: Criticism of the proposed Medicare prescription drug benefit has rightly emphasized its cost to taxpayers. But another price could be lost lives due to a decline in the number of innovative new medicines. As part of the deal to secure one-vote passage of its Medicare bill last month, the House will soon be voting on a measure that would allow the widespread reimportation of American-produced prescription drugs, which often sell at significantly lower prices abroad. Reimportation could end up undermining the intellectual property protections the U.S. has worked so hard to build into the world trading system. That's because foreign governments could take the industry's response -- supply limits and higher prices -- as an excuse to seize drug patents . The U.S. is already facing strong pressure within the World Trade Organization to allow the "compulsory licensing" of drugs to generic producers for an ever-widening array of maladies. Needless to say, the less able drug companies are to recoup the costs of development through patent protection, the less risk they will be willing to take in finding new drugs. 8:46:18 PM    comment []

THE FINAL DAYS OF ALTHEIMER & GRAY   12:49:34 PM    comment []

Brain Drain of Engineers from the United States to Asia--Is It Possible? While options are under attack in the U.S., elsewhere the stock option as a recruiting tool is on the rise. Asian engineers educated at MIT and Stanford and CalTech are returning to their native Korea or Hong Kong or Taiwan, not just out of patriotic zeal, but in search of the kind of Big Payoff that is now suspect in the U.S. Taiwan in particular has become a magnet for talent, and no one can tour the chip plants just outside Taipei without the same sense of amazement one used to feel on his or her first visit to Silicon Valley. Is the next cycle of "Go West, Young Man" about to begin? Yes. The prospect of native U.S. engineers migrating to Asia may seem like a stretch. All I can tell you is that in 1960 more than one proper Bostonian scoffed at the very idea that any self-respecting New Englander could leave the land of the Boston Symphony and Marblehead and Harvard and the Red Sox and Nantucket for culturally deprived California. Today, many semiconductor engineers are finding out that the divide between Asia and California is not much greater than the divide between the Back Bay and the Bay Area. Finally, it is worth noting that when the math and science prizes are handed out in our high schools and colleges, students of Asian origin are often at the top of the list. observations of GEORGE CHAMILLARD is chairman and CEO of Teradyne, a Boston-based maker of automatic test equipment for the electronics industry. 9:46:49 AM    comment []