It’s safe to say that if you could patent the sun, Donald Rumsfeld would have long since put in an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. His former company Gilead Sciences, which also owns the patents on four AIDS treatments, spends a great deal of energy trying to block the distribution of cheaper generic versions of its lifesaving drugs in the developing world. It has been targeted for these activities by public health activists in the U.S., who point out that some of Gilead’s key medicines were developed on grants funded by taxpayers.18 Gilead, for its part, sees epidemics
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