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Q22 Single choice

Pharmaceutical manufacturer; In our Industry, the number of patents a company manages to obtain Is a
good measure of the strength of the company's research and development efforts.

Economist: I disagree. Simply counting patents means failing to distinguish between fruitful patents, which lead to successful new products or stimulate further advances in research, or both, and sterile patents, which do neither.

Which of the following, if true, could best be used by the manufacturer to defend the manufacturer's position against the economist's objection?

A
In the pharmaceutical Industry, patents that promise to prove fruitful are not infrequently rendered obsolete by a newly registered patent.
B
In the pharmaceutical Industry, patents that prove fruitful are, as a proportion of all patents obtained, fairly constant from company to company.
C
The Distinction between fruitful and sterile patents is Justified by clear instances of the two types, but many patents fall somewhere in between.
D
In the pharmaceutical Industry, patents are typically awarded not to the people chiefly responsible for producing the work leading to the patent but Instead to those people's employers.
E
There is often a considerable time lag between the completion of the work that produced a patentable innovation and the official award of the patent.

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