The Role of Patent Law in Regulating Access to Medicines

some laboratory mice. He recorded in his diary: ‘the two treated mice seemed very well’.1 Next he observed that the four untreated mice were dead. In reporting these observations to his Oxford colleagues, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, the experiment confirmed what they had all hoped for: that Penicillium notatum, a naturally occurring substance, first discovered by Alexander Fleming in 19282, arrested the spread of systemic bacterial infection. The experiment’s success3 was a crucial step in the development of the world’s first antibiotic, a medicine which saved the lives of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers and the forerunner to more powerful antibiotics. Florey, as Professor of Pathology, was the leader of the research team and he was responsible for the overall direction of the research; indeed, it was he, after reading Fleming’s paper in 1938, who made the decision to undertake the scientific research that would transform Fleming’s almost forgotten research into a life saving medicine. The motivation for this research was not, however, anything to do with the expectation of a patent. In fact, according to Florey, not even the prospect o