The Fabulous Answer ~ Part 3
You're stymied~the doctors aren't interested, the hospitals aren't interested, and the research centers aren't interested. There's something wrong with the system! It has evolved from a humanitarian oriented, dedicated science to a closed shop where egotistical self interest and protectionism that worships the personal glory and glorifies the almighty dollars that seem to be paramount in the order of the importance of things as the medical establishment sees it.
"Breathes there a man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself has said,
This was my own, my native land
Til the bureaucrats stole it
With their dishonest greedy hand
And now my life and health and wealth
Are merely subjects for their command"
You are a poet and you didn't know it, but you know that you are damned mad. You read in the paper, or see on the boob tube where people are badly burned, and sometimes little children, and you cry inside.
Your frustration leads you to put an ad in the paper to try to sell some of your inventions. You reason that if you had some money, you could advertise and let some of the world know about Lucky. You would even give some of it away to people who needed it.
You place an ad in the New York Times on Sunday, in the column, "Investment Capital Wanted." You offer 68 inventions for sale. Commercial, industrial, military, that's right, the U.S. Government has turned down every invention you ever offered them. (That puts you in real good company: ~ like the Wright Brothers, Sikorsky, the inventor of the jet engine, the snorkel, and a thousand others. Your phone gets tapped, and your mail gets confiscated. Strange ~ No! That's the way your new fascist government operates. Worse than the Russians threaten their dissident writers, do your elected officials threaten your inventors? You prove it! You send self-addressed stamped envelopes to a dozen people; not one comes back. Even your utility bills start arriving with a yellow sticker ~ address unknown ~ strange ~ you haven't moved in three years. The Sunday Times goes all over the world: Helsinki ~ Calcutta ~ Hong-Kong ~ Singapore. But you get not one single inquiry as curiosity even as to what your 68 inventions might be. And yet! Your local paper carries ads asking inventors to contact interested people (too bad they're mostly crooks). Now you have a real great opinion of your leadership. Your great leaders do not come to ask what do you have that is important enough for them to keep from the world. Nor in thirty years have they been willing to enter into any kind of honest negotiation. Bu they will invade your privacy and remove your constitutional rights just like the KGB. That's government censorship in its worst form. If you don't have the right to sell your own inventions, what rights do you have? If you were black, you could at least demand your civil rights. You'd have the NAACP to represent you, but you are just an inventor and a humanitarian and you have no rights. You are sure of it now because six years later your phone is still tapped. (Isn't that illegal?) You have been the object of at least 50 or 60 entrapment procedures.
It is not funny that Jimmy Carter wanted to export human rights to the rest of the world, but he ignored his own countrymen.
The American Politicians do not torture dissidents, they are more clever than that. The local police will be glad to handle that. They must have spent upwards of a quarter million dollars on entrapment procedures in the past six years just looking for an excuse to put you in jail. They have stationed squad cars at the end of your block, hoping that you will go through the stop sign. They have sent dozens of undercover policewomen to answer ads you placed for a secretary to type your book.
The American political police do not torture their victims, they throw you in a cell with a dozen big bad blacks and just tell them that's an extra carton of cigarettes for them if you come out dead. And, oh yeah, just to make sure, they say that you called them niggers! See, you're dead! But the police never laid a finger on you. (KGB ~ Take a lesson from America's civil servants who have, on America's propaganda medium (the boob tube), sworn to uphold and protect.
You have found that it is a free country only if you never do anything out of the ordinary (like inventing a VTOL or discovering an answer to cancer, or writing a book). You're still writing even though the only typed copy of your chapter outline was stolen by a police plant. You have become so disillusioned that you enlist the aid of a salesman who called you up and drove up from Miami to see you.
This salesman had invented a gadget that locks the gas pedal of a car to help prevent it from being stolen. A good idea, the only problem being that a gadget to lock the gearshift in park is simpler and cheaper. (Why don't the big auto makers provide such a gadget as an option?) Because they won't take the effort (nor will the insurance companies) to educate the public that your insurance won't, in any way, cover all your loss for inconvenience or risk of being stranded in a dangerous situation) or loss of personal and sometimes irreplaceable property. Their lack of interest in providing such an expensive option makes you believe that they like your car being stolen. Then they can sell you another one.
YOU have a hard time convincing your new partner that it is useless to try and sell an invention to a corporation in America. He wastes four years of his time and yours, before he has a heart attack. After the heart attack he gives up. But he did prove again and again, that the lawyers and engineers of America have new technology shut down unless they can grab both the credit and the MONEY. In the 1970s a senate investigating committee reported that 60% of all significant inventions originated with individuals working alone. What did they do about it? NOTHING ~ NOTHING ~ NOTHING ~ After all, inventors don't have lobbyists. If you stood all the people in the world end to end, inventors would be the tiniest minority. Inventors are ignored, cheated, stolen from and discriminated against.
You gather statistics to prove your point because people will say that you are just talking sour grapes because no one likes your invention.
And you say, "NO ONE LIKES ANY OF MY 88 INVENTIONS!" Hardly logical!!!
Actually, at that time, you admit that you only have 68 inventions. It is now six years later that you have 88. However, because of the inventions, and your partner salesman's insistence that we try the big companies that have the capital to do a real job with a discovery, that you waste the next four years of your life trying to communicate with Corporate America. You and your partner include "Lucky" in your program and you make many contacts. Many contacts through the mail, and many in person to local pharmaceutical distributors and manufacturers. The first thing that happens is that they present you with a form to sign that no inventor or discoverer in his right mind would sign.
All these forms were put together by lawyers that have no financial stakes in any of the new products. Therefore, the object of the game is to prevent any future, past, or present claims by anyone that will stand up in court. They do their job admirably! Almost single-handedly, they have shut down productivity in America. It's not bad enough that the engineers will always claim that they are already working on such an identical device, but the lawyers disclosure form always starts off by saying how the corporation will protect your rights ~ which you find out ~ means ~ that you retain the right to sue this giant corporation in a patent court if you have 10 million dollars for legal fees, and if you are protected by a foolproof patent (and there is no such thing). Or, if you are not damn fool enough to sign one of their disclosure forms which always have a last paragraph, (after they have spent three or four pages telling you how they will honor your disclosure) which start off with the word HOWEVER ~ should the corporation decide to manufacture, develop or produce such a device, they will in no way be obligated for any compensation whatsoever except that which may (or may not) be deemed appropriate by the Corporation.
According to that, a dollar may be deemed to be too much!
Not being damned fools, you drew up your own disclosure forms. Very few signed them. You didn't tell them much. So much for America's productivity. Now you knew why America was way behind the rest of the world in technology, and a lot of America was out of work. It's too damn bad that President Reagan hadn't the slightest idea what happened to America's great inventors. Several whole generations are missing.
You sent literature and samples to all the big drug companies and nobody was interested. A few local companies were interested: some were interested in stealing your ideas. Another actually agreed to test Lucky. You were elated, that's all you ever asked!
You waited months, still no report. You had called about every week to check progress, you got promises. After waiting a year of your life ~ and a lot of other lives ~ for good ~ you finally found out that their doctor in charge of the lab hadn't tested it at all. At least that's what the vice president said.
But he also did say that the reason he finally got interested enough to check with the lab, was that he had been trying it on her hands for a condition that she had had for three years, and so embarrassed that she always wore gloves outside the house. In Florida that's a real problem. We found out about this over the phone when we found out that he had brought home a fresh batch which we had provided for the new lab doctor. The vice president of this pharmaceutical corporation, of course, had access to every known product to use for his wife's condition. He then said that his wife had objected to his throwing away the old "Lucky" because she said, it was working. Nevertheless, the owner of his company would not commit to research on "Lucky."
An accountant who knew a lot of doctors was located in Miami by our partner, and he became impressed by what he knew about "Lucky." He took you to meet the representative of a doctors' investment group. Because he was their accountant, he knew that some of the doctors in that group had an income of over a half million dollars a year. Well, they had the money ~ but ~ they weren't interested in mankind ~ maybe some womenkind, but definitely not something that would save people from operations. (Necessary or not, the fee was the same.) You were disgusted, you moved to another town near a friend who said he might be able to help.
Whey you first approached the apartment where you were going to live, you met some neighbors who were playing fetch with their dog on the front lawn. It was noticeable that the dog, although enthusiastic about the game, had a bandage on one foot and he was definitely limping. Since inventors have a curious nature, you asked what was wrong with the dog's foot. The owner informed you that he had landed on a piece of glass two weeks ago. Remember this now ~ yes, he had been to the vet twice. But it still wasn't healed up ~ and he still limped. You, with your big mouth, volunteered as to how he could heal that foot in a few days.
The owner had an open mind, and he listened. He was a Cuban, he had not yet become a stupid gringo. You had already met plenty of those! You told him that just before putting the dog to bed for the night, to wash the cut well and put a generous glob of "Lucky" into the wound. Bandage it well, you told him, because dogs are crazy about the stuff and they will eat it all up. Coincidentally your partner had made an appointment with a veterinarian nearby who had agreed to try "Lucky" but he wanted more information. When you came home that day (the very next day) there was the dog playing fetch again. You hollered at the owner from across the lawn, "Why did you take the bandage off?"
The owner said, "because it's all healed up." Sho-nuff, that dumb dawg wasn't even limping, and he was running all over the place.
You know now that everybody's going to call you a liar whenever you tell that story ~ everybody that is ~ except the people who were there.
There's a little bit more:
Last updated on 04/19/08 08:39 PM
