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We reprint elsewhere extracts from an article by Stewart Griscom on the Drinker-Emerson respirator fuss. This controversy involves a point which merits the serious consideration of readers of this column. Should a life-saving device be subject to monopoly through patent rights?

Law and humanitarian ethics part company here. Legally, Banting and Best could probably have patented insulin; ethically, they could not. Should ethics require less because a life-saving product is mechanical rather than biological, or because the originator does not happen to be a member of the medical profession?

The exacting of royalties on such inventions should be avoided lest it curtail the availability of the instrument. Given the need, any community would meet the price, whatever the royalty might be. However, where the instrument must be provided as a precaution, every cent of royalty or profit added to the price must act as a deterrent to its purchase.

Mr. Griscom cites a suggestion that therapeutic and life-saving devices developed in colleges should be patented and that these patents should then be transferred to an inter-institutional commission empowered to license all worthy applicants who can guarantee reliability and a reasonable price. We endorse that suggestion. We might add, the suggestion that American businessmen could be found who would take pride in manufacturing a non-profit basis such devices as are actually life-saving.

It would seem that, with all our endowments and foundations and great individual philanthropists, there would be no lack of material blessings for the inventors of such tangible benefactions as the respirator apparatus.

In conclusion, we contend that a patent for life-saving devices can only be justified on the doubtful grounds that it might help to eliminate poorly designed and potentially dangerous models for the market. As a guarantee of private profit, it should not be tolerated.