Research and development, or they will only do it for the money

Once in a while I pick up comments from American conservative commentators that greed is essential as without it there would be no incentive to invent anything, or undertake scientific research usw.

People are not actually interested in the discoveries or inventions, it is only the money they are to gain that drives them to do it.

I would personally dismiss this for the nonsense that it is. It is IMHO a complete misunderstanding of the intellectual process.

Move on.

Consider the case of Doctor Paul Ehrlich.

"Who?", you might be asking. Actually if you had lived in Germany in the 1940s, you would not even have been able to acknowledge his existence, being to science what Heinrich Heine was to poetry. Rather like under the Nazis in the 1940s, Heine was no longer the author of the poem the "Lorelei" (it was apparently an anonymous work), so Doctor Paul Ehrlich was not a pioneer in research into chemotherapy, nor the person who formulated "Salvarsan" - the first known treatment produced for treating syphilis.

Translated for those who did not get the gist of the last sentence - Ehrlich, like Heine, was Jewish, so his medical work in the field of chemotherapy and the discovery of the cure for syphilis were written off by the Nazis. Wrongly, of course!  

The cause of syphilis had actually been discovered by Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hofmann in 1905, and the first antibody test produced by August Paul von Wassermann, working with Julius Citron and Albert Neisser at the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin in 1906.

While working in private practice previously in Berlin, Ehrlich had himself done research at the Koch Institute (NB - free of charge, out of his interest in the science and concern to find solutions. One can hardly imagine that the profit motive was the driving force if he was prepared to undertake extra work without reward!).

While at the Koch Institute, Ehrlich had establish his own research institute (Das Institut für experimentelle Therapie), which moved to Frankfurt in 1899, and it was while working an offshoot of his Institute, the Georg-Speyer-Haus in Frankfurt, that he made his breakthrough discovery in 1909.

One can hardly imagine him jumping in the air screaming "I'm rich, I'm rich", when the breakthrough discovery was made. Rather you could foresee the satisfaction of finding a cure for what was a known social scourge. 

As a sexually transmitted disease, syphilis was something anyway that was not to be discussed in polite society. One recalls the reaction to Ibsen's play "Ghosts" in Norway a few years earlier. And despite the many notable personalities of the time across the world who had caught it, it was seen as much as a character flaw as a disease. To catch it was the sign of a person lacking a high sense of morality and one who indulged in unwarranted promiscuous behaviour.

So making the cure known involved overcoming many barriers, as did getting the product to where it was required. There was also the "moral" argument to overcome that having a cure for syphilis would lead to an increase in promiscuous behaviour! As it was, the toxic nature of the remedy often had unpleasant and occasionally lethal side effects, so whether this argument was totally valid is open to question.

Ehrlich though was to gain a Nobel Prize for his work, and in later years, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his reputation was re-established in Germany.

Today the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut can be found in Langen, in the southern suburbs of Frankfurt. It is administered by the German Ministry of Health and its main objective (and I quote from the website) is "the approval of clinical trials and the marketing authorisation of particular groups of medicinal products". Maybe a wider range of activities than those pursued by Ehrlich himself, but one of which he would have no doubt approved.

The only question left is whether he died rich, and money was a serious motive after all. A good question to which I have found no satisfactory answer. From my reading I gain the impression that he was a true man of science for whom research and finding resolution to medical problems were the most important criteria, and if he did gain financially as a result it was a by-product, not the principle aim, of the results of his endeavours.