Frederick Banting, who patented insulin, sold that to the University of Toronto for $1. Because it belongs to humanity, the sick, sufferers with diabetes.
2021, is the 100-year anniversary of the discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting, James B. Collip, Charles Best, and John J.R. Macleod. The patent for the hormone, which was extracted from an animal pancreas with the goal of helping those with diabetes control their blood sugar, was sold to the Governors of the University of Toronto in 1922 for only one dollar. The four men credited with this groundbreaking discovery had no shortage of disagreements — Banting and Macleod chose not to put their names on the patent, with Banting of the opinion that as a physician who had taken the Hippocratic oath, it would be inappropriate for him to patent the discovery of a medical treatment. But even those who did opt to patent the hormone chose not to profit from it, despite facing the prospect of astonishing wealth from their potent and widely-needed treatment…
Since its discovery, insulin has actually become cheaper to produce. Most insulin on the market today is recombinant…If the price of insulin amounted solely to the manufacturing cost, each person with diabetes would pay a maximum of $6 for insulin each month. The enormous disparity between this estimation and the much more expensive reality is attributed to price gouging by pharmaceutical companies.
Read the complete article and draw your own conclusions. No surprises, eh?
Republican lawmakers on Sunday successfully stripped a $35 price cap on the cost of insulin for many patients from the ambitious legislative package Democrats are moving through Congress this weekend, invoking arcane Senate rules to jettison the measure.
The insulin cap is a long-running ambition of Democrats, who want it to apply to patients on Medicare and private insurance. Republicans left the portion that applies to Medicare patients untouched but stripped the insulin cap for other patients. Bipartisan talks on a broader insulin pricing bill faltered earlier this year.
The Senate parliamentarian earlier in the weekend ruled that part of the Democrats’ cap, included in the Inflation Reduction Act, did not comply with the rules that allow them to advance a bill under the process known as reconciliation — a tactic that helps them avert a GOP filibuster. That gave the Republicans an opening to jettison it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/07/insulin-cap-budget-congress/