In other cases, if the information gained from the treatment (or from other research) had been published, other doctors could have improved upon it, and could have helped to improve, or even save the lives of their own patients.
fyi, patents are publications that explain *exactly* how to something works, and they are supposed to be granted only if it someone "familiar with the art" can reproduce it after reading the patent.
also, anyone can make an improvement on a patent and then re-patent that improvement as a seperate patent.
your father was right in that while you may learn and understand the new procedure, you cannot *practice* it for 17 years. but you *can* make an improvement on it, and then re-patent that, or "open source" it, or do whatever you'd like.
You would still be unable to perform the procedure (even your improved version of it) without a patent license from the original patent holder. This stymies development on some research branches that might otherwise be explored since the potential reward is lower. (You may even end up dealing with some hard-nosed doctor that refused to grant a license, and you'd be out everything.)
Patents are a two-edged sword in physical processes. Some innovation is spurred, other is stymied. They work best where the field is broad and there are many unencumbered starting points. Hopefully by the time you mine out the best of those, some of them have expired and are unencumbered again. But I believe patents are a one-edged sword with respect to software. It's very difficult to write anything but a "hello, world" without running into a patent, whether you know it or not, and because there's no physical process to limit the speed at which development can research, everybody is always building on someone else's work, or reinventing something that's been done because it needs to be. Research is only slowed in this environment, and there are plenty of other incentives to create. We don't need _or_ want patents in software.
None of this applies to copyright, by the way, IMO. I think copyright is a very effective tool to protect software, and my only complaint about it (in general, not just software) is that the terms are too insanely long. (I believe open-source will succeed because it is a better way to do things, not because it's morally wrong to copyright software.)
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