You can't miss what doesn't exist

One thing I think is important to note is that the scientist who first cultured Henrietta Lack's cells, Guy-something-something*, never made a dime off of the cells or the techniques he invented- his was a life that took money in and gave science out. Given how prevalent the cells are and that people will give them away, it seems like the companies selling them are really selling convenience, not the cells themselves. Which doesn't make it okay to steal them and cell them, but is noticeably better than stealing them for the express purpose of profit.

I also find it telling that Dr. Guy's fondest wish was to do to himself what he'd done to Henrietta: he was devastated when his cancer was so inoperable they didn't remove any cells at all, preventing him from creating his own cell line. Told he was definitely going to die, he volunteered himself for a bunch of not-yet-tested on humans research, purely to help science.
Would science progress faster if all scientists were like Guy, and there were no profit motive? It depends. I think when a lot of people think about this, they're envisioning transforming everyone who does medical research for money into someone who does it for love. That's a great thought, but it's not what's going to happen. What happens is everyone who's in it for profit goes to a different industry and we end up with less medicine. The only thing worse than a cure you can't afford is a cure that doesn't exist. And in 30 years the expensive cure will be cheap(er), but the non-existent cure is still non-existent.

So to prove that taking the profit motive out of medical research would be net-beneficial, you have to show that the friction caused by profit motives is greater than the benefit. And there is friction: it leads people to keep research a secret, slowing new discoveries. Coordination costs for treatments that require patents from multiple owners can quickly dwarf the potential profits, leading to a loss for everyone as no one gets money or treatment. And of course, the suffering or death of people who couldn't afford the medicine.

What does profit motive get us in return? Well, we can assume pharmaceutical companies wouldn't pursue products without them. It's pretty clear that they overinvest in lifestyle drugs, relative to the social optimum, because they can charge whatever the hell they want for them, without fear of photogenic cancer patients shaming them into offering it at a lower price. Researching new drugs is an expensive and failure-prone process: pharmaceutical companies look like they have high profits, but what they really have is highly variable profits with the unprofitable companies going out of business. it seems- is- tragic to watch someone die when there is a cure they can't afford, but I prefer that to a world where everyone dies because there's no incentive to create a cure. Right now we strike a compromise, letting companies earn profit on drugs for a while (I believe it's 32 years, but the clock starts ticking when the substance is patented, not when it's approved for use, so the functional life of a drug is much shorter than that), and I think that's a good middle ground, although I wouldn't know where to begin figuring out what the correct length of time is.

Is there a way to keep the benefits of the profit motive without the cost? Maybe. But I have to discuss more of the financing first.

*I'm not being cute, his first or possibly last name really is Guy

The magazine is unclear on the topic of ugly women's enjoyment of sex

20 minutes into a documentary is too early to have an opinion, but I'm too angry to finish it without getting this out, so:

In Hugh Hefner: Activist, Playboy, Rebel, multiple people claim that Playboy was about celebrating and promoting the fact that women like sex tooo(r depending on whose talking, that good girls like sex too). 98% of my knowledge of Playboy comes from watching The Girls Next Door and I know basically nothing about early Playboy, but I'm pretty sure this is bullshit. Or rather, it's not as good as the people saying it think it is.

Good would be celebrating women enjoying sex on their own terms. What Playboy celebrated, through its policy of including a hint of a man in every pictorial, and striving for centerfolds that had normal day jobs and "the girl next door" look,* was the idea that just around the corner was a woman who met a very specific standard of beauty that would love to do exactly what you loved. I don't want to say ingenue and sexual agency can *never* go together, but I am pretty sure that ingenues en masse don't promote agency. I also get the feeling Playboy didn't/doesn't think woman who liked sex were particularly choosy about who it was with, although I can't tell you what I'm basing this on.

To do it the right way, you'd have to find women who were enjoying sex on their own terms and just photograph them doing what them enjoy. Or here's a really radical idea- share it in a way not designed purely for men to jerk off too. Possibly you could hire some female writers. I'm just spitballing ideas here.

It's entirely possible the idea that the woman should enjoy sex too was revolutionary. I believe that no one can be more than a certain amount better than the time they're born in, and we should celebrate people who approach that limit, even if they look awful by today's standards. Much like I'm glad Howard Stern exists, providing the FCC with low hanging fruit that has the money to fight back, I'm glad Playboy was pissing off censors in the 1950s. And I get that it's possible to be an envelope pusher in your 20s and then run out of steam. But Hefner is still alive and every time I see his smug face talking about all he's done for women I want to punch it.

*Jenny McArtny says there's no way she would have been hired if she showed up to her audition looking polished. For a magazine that has always airbrushed photos until they're closer to illustrations, that's a pretty big statement on who is going to be controlling the pretty.