Another case where the economics/politics of the drug industry appears to have distorted research and development of a potentially enormously important life-saving technology is that of bacteriophages.

These provide an alternative way of dealing with bacterial infections, which had been developed in the Soviet Union, and which could in principle be crucial in face of increasing resistance to antibiotics, but it appears to have been virtually neglected and sidetracked, both in the West and in the former Soviet Union.

Perhaps, in time, someone will indeed come along and find a way to make money out of the technology, and it will take off, probably after a lot of unnecessary suffering and deaths.