John Sulston

The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars, and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace.

The human world lives in a framework called global economics. We live in a system based on GDP, which drives consumption. it causes people to compete with each other through trade in a way that they all grow.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.