Most people have a very cartoonish view of what goes into making a drug.
It's not at all folk medicine. Medicinal chemists and ethnobotonists study folk medicine, and do so with good reason, but if folk medicine was all that great, life expectancy would have been in the high seventies in the 15th century and it wasn't.
My Grandmother died at the age of 39, with seven children under the age of 11, because of an infection that might have been cured today with a simple trip to the drug store. No folk medicine person could have saved her life.
If you eat a digitalis plant to cure your heart disease, it may kill you, since digitalis is a toxin and you have no control on the growing conditions under which the plant is grown.
If your physician prescribes digitalis for your heart condition, your life may be saved, because the digitalis in most cases has been managed under strictly regulated conditions; and it it's found to have not been so managed, the FDA has the power to shut the operation down.
Several years back, L-Tryptophan sold as a supplement under DSHEA laws, owing to the lack of regulation to which "supplements" are not subject. Regrettably, I had occasion to deal with some DSHEA people in the early 1990's, and frankly the sleaze and irresponsibility of these people startled me, and I'm seldom startled by moral malfeasance any more at my age. This is a common amino acid, commonly found in milk, but the DSHEA people - unregulated as they were - managed to kill people with it.
Post-epidemic eosinophilia myalgia syndrome associated with L-Tryptophan
I know that lives have been saved owing to my efforts and the efforts of many thousands of colleagues. Not everything I've seen in this industry has been ethically satisfying, but I can say that I'm extremely proud of the work I did in the early 1990's which made me a foot soldier in the war on AIDS. I think millions of people who might have died in that effort lived as a result of the hard work, the long nights, the frustration, the persistence of hundreds of thousands of highly trained and highly educated ethical pharmaceutical workers.
Not everything I've seen in my career has been pretty, but overall, I'm pleased to have been associated with the pharmaceutical industry, one of the bright points of having lived.
If you think it was easy, think again. It goes way beyond the sleepless nights of an academic career, although certainly that much is involved. The difficulty and the strain and the sense of responsibility goes on and on and on. I was on the phone with manufacturing plants while my two year old son was in surgery because if I wasn't on the phone, people might die.
That's the stakes my friend.
Now, it is true that in the case mentioned in the OP, that the failure to possess a strong patent - a composition of matter patent - will weaken the chances of one of these compounds being developed into a drug, as venal as they may be, but I assure you that if one them becomes a drug, it will because someone really, really, really cared.
A lot of people in the pharmaceutical industry really, really, really care; I know many of them personally.
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