it has become clear over the last decade that photosynthesis—where a particle of light comes in from the sun, is absorbed by a chlorophyll molecule, the energy rattles around inside a leaf and gets turned into more leaves—is operating in a very quantum mechanical fashion.
Exactly the same kinds of models that we use to look at quantum computation allow us to understand what’s happening in photosynthesis. It turns out that photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae are extremely sophisticated in the way they use quantum mechanics. They use quantum coherence and funky effects like entanglement to get very high efficiency of energy transport.
.. Indeed, what’s happening in quantum information and quantum computing is it’s become more and more clear that quantum information is a universal language for how nature behaves.
.. this centerfold showed which parts of physics were talking with other parts of physics, who in this field was talking with this other field. They had to put quantum information right in the middle because everybody was talking with the people in quantum information.
.. by using ideas from quantum information, we’ve constructed systems that are much better than even the most efficient, naturally occurring system.
.. Twenty years ago, I wrote the first algorithms for how you could program the quantum computers we have now to explore how their quantum systems behave.
.. If you want to find out what happens when you send a photon a few billionths of second backwards in time and have a try to kill its former self, well, we have experiment that tests to see what happens when you do that.
.. It also turns out that quantum computers can detect and identify patterns that are very hard for a classical computer to detect. For example, if you have a huge dataset like the tick-by-tick history of all the stocks in the Dow Jones over the last fifty years, it’s a big dataset.
If you say, “I’d like to process this to find out what a good portfolio would be for me if I can tolerate a certain amount of risk and I want to have a certain amount of return.” Well, with a pretty small quantum computer, the kind that we’re going to have in the next five years or so, you could find the answer to that question much more accurately then you could do on a classical computer.
.. I, myself, am a theorist, so the experimentalists don’t like me to use a screwdriver in their lab because I tend to break things
.. Quantum computers are still at the stage where we have a small number of bits—10 bits that we can use, soon 50 bits, 100 quantum bits that we can use. Even though this is piddling by comparison with the classical computer, because quantum computers for specific problems are so much more powerful than classic computers
.. Lockheed Martin has bought a D‑Wave computer, Google and NASA have bought them, the Army is buying some of them.
.. I’ve been working with the folks at D-Wave to try to figure out why they are successful when they shouldn’t be. Ever since then, I patent everything by the way, even if I don’t know whether it’s going to work or not.
.. The strategy I’ve learned is that there’re a huge number of technologies out there, and we don’t have to adopt them. You don’t have to adopt these technologies.
You can use the ones that you like. You can not use the ones that you don’t like. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter or other social media, because I feel that there’s presence and there’s absence, and then there’s cyberpresence, and cyberpresence is a heck of a lot closer to absence than it is to actual presence.
.. DARPA was the first funding agency to recognize that this role of quantum mechanics in photosynthesis was a very important thing. They created the first program to fund looking at funky effects like quantum coherence and entanglement in photosynthesis and in energy transport.
.. The largest group or concentration of people working on quantum computation are in Canada at the Institute for Quantum Computing, in Waterloo
.. He had this intuition, and he came up with a formal notion of a quantum computer. But for more than five years or so, he couldn’t come up with something where it could do better.
Then when he finally came up with something, he showed where a classical computer takes two or three steps on average to this problem, a quantum computer can do it in one.
The Lesson of EpiPens: Why Drug Prices Spike, Again and Again
Other companies tried to sell other injectors at a slightly lower price, but competing with Mylan was tough, since the EpiPen seemed synonymous with the drug. One injector, Adrenaclick, costs $450, and as low as about $140 with a coupon for a two-pen kit.
“Doctors say, ‘My patients know how to use the EpiPen.’ Parents say, ‘They’re my kids, I trust this brand,’ ” said Doug Hirsch, the chief executive of GoodRx, a website that helps consumers shop for cheaper drugs. “People don’t think there’s a choice.”
Working to Lower Drug Costs by Challenging Questionable Patents
Through the Coalition for Affordable Drugs, a company they formed this year, Mr. Bass and Mr. Spangenberg identify pharmaceutical patents that they consider weak or abusive. Then they request that a unit of the United States Patent and Trademark Office review the legitimacy of the patents.
By mid-November, the firm had filed 33 requests for patent reviews, targeting 13 drugs from a dozen companies.
Intellectual property: A question of utility
most of the wonders of the modern age, from mule-spinning to railways, steamships to gas lamps, seemed to have emerged without the help of patents. If the Industrial Revolution didn’t need them, why have them at all?
.. It has been the lure of membership of the World Trade Organisation that has pushed patent rights into emerging economies such as China’s. One of the reasons why talks on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal involving countries which produce 40% of the world’s economic output, ended inconclusively last month was the strong patent protection Western countries wanted for biotech-based drugs.
.. A growing amount of research in recent years, including a 2004 study by America’s National Academy of Sciences, suggests that, with a few exceptions such as medicines, society as a whole might even be better off with no patents than with the mess that is today’s system.
.. Reviewing 23 20th-century studies Mr Boldrin and Mr Levine found “weak or no evidence that strengthening patent regimes increases innovation”—all it does is lead to more patents being filed, which is not the same thing.
.. Mr Boldrin and Mr Levine argue that patent filings tend to be carefully written so as to obscure how the patented idea works even from experts in the field.
In his history of intellectual property, Piracy, Adrian Johns of the University of Chicago notes that such shenanigans were already under way in the 18th century, with inventors taking care to leave out as much detail as possible from their applications.
.. Mr Boldrin and Mr Levine reckon that once subsidies and tax breaks are accounted for, American private industry pays for only about a third of the country’s biomedical research.