In 1923, three men in Toronto held the patent to insulin and sold it to their university for a pound each.
Banting wanted it understood that the discovery was not his to profit from. The idea was simple, almost embarrassing by modern standards: a medicine that keeps people alive should belong to the people it keeps alive. He could have been one of the richest men of the century. He chose a pound and a clear conscience.
A hundred years later, insulin is a multi-billion-pound industry. The formula has been tweaked, repatented, tweaked again, and repatented again, each tiny adjustment quietly resetting the clock and the price. In the country that does this most enthusiastically, there are diabetics rationing the one substance standing between them and a coma, because the thing that was given away for a pound now costs more than their rent.
The molecule has not become harder to make. If anything it has become trivially easy. What changed was never the science.
Banting gave it to the world. The world was then sold it back, by the dose, at a markup he would have found genuinely difficult to believe.
"President Donald Trump's administration is mobilizing U.S. diplomats to lobby against a U.N. resolution calling on Washington to lift its decades-long embargo on Cuba, in part by sharing details of Cuba’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to an internal State Department cable seen by Reuters.
As part of the administration's campaign, U.S. diplomats will tell countries that the Cuban government is actively supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine with up to 5,000 Cubans fighting alongside Moscow's forces."
@humeyra_pamuk
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Great sadness today. Fearghas McKay @calanish has passed away. Fearghas will be dearly missed by the whole community. His larger-than-life personality, warmth, and kindness touched so many folks. A sad day also for the @flexOptix family. He now joins his beloved Susan Forney. 🥀
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites. https://t.co/yToVAmwcwn
12th Night (6th Jan) Mummers Play running order is as follows...
7.15 for 7.30, The Star
8.00 - The 3 Pigeons
8.30 - The Angel Hotel
9.30 - The Keep
10.00 - The Royal Oak
See you there! Wassail!