Oakland lawyer and activist among MacArthur ‘genius grant’ recipients
An Oakland-based attorney is among the recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants,” an $800,000 gift that gives each recipient unfettered freedom to pursue creative ideas in their field.
Priti Krishtel, 44, is a health justice lawyer and co-founder and co-executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK), a team of lawyers and scientists that exposes inequities in the patent system to boost access to affordable, life-saving medications.
“What a powerful validation of the change the movement is about to make,” she tweeted after hearing the news. “Let’s go!!!”
The awards, announced Wednesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, were given to 25 recipients. They’re a mix of the famous and obscure, representing a broad cross section of the arts, economics and science. They work in settings as diverse as the wilds of South Carolina to inner-city Chicago.
“The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science,” according to Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.
Krishtel, a graduate of UC Berkeley, became aware of the drug-affordability problem while working with low-income people with HIV/AIDS in India in the early 2000s. Many of her clients were struggling and even dying because they couldn’t afford the lifesaving medicines they needed.
The root cause of the crisis, she concluded, is the patent system. Patents create a monopoly on a medicine, inhibiting competition and pushing up prices. She decided to walk away from a lucrative job with a Los Angeles law firm to make a difference in the lives of the sick and the poor.
Her father, now retired, was a successful inventor with many patents to his name, she said in a 2020 TED Talk. “There’s a recognition in our family that everything I’ve been able to do is because America enabled my father to fulfill his potential as an inventor.”
But the original intention behind the patent system — to motivate people by rewarding them with a time limited monopoly — has been distorted, she said. Corporations now seek to extend patent protections as long as possible without adding anything new.
“They can set prices at whim,” she said. “And because these are medicines and not designer watches, we have no choice but to pay.”
Drug companies have built “patent walls,” she says. This is a strategy to block competition by stacking patents, like bricks, to create a fortress around intellectual property, ensuring that no one else can make the drug or do any research that is related to it.
The 12 best-selling drugs in America have, on average, 125 patents filed on each medicine, “often for things we’ve known how to do for decades, like putting two pills into one,” she said.
Krishtel is working for reform, advocating for a system that raises the bar on what it takes to get a patent and amends the incentives so that drug makers get revenue based on the merit, not the number, of patents. She is seeking to ease transparency and access to the U.S. Patent Office, expand congressional oversight and give the average American, not just a drug company, legal standing to go to court to challenge a patent.
“I think it is possible for this system to grow into something that is far more inclusive, equitable and just than the one we have today,” she said in a MacArthur interview.
“We need a competitive marketplace. We also need a collaborative one,” she said. “When we face the next pandemic, what we should all aspire to is a system where drug makers are incentivized to share their intellectual property to save lives.”
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