I've had to learn quite a bit about patent law (for a lay person) in the last couple years. Unfortunately, much of this learning has come the hard way. That is, I and a couple colleagues published some results that had potentially protectable ideas that are now not protectable due to their being in the public domain ("prior art" in IP parlance).

The down side of that is that now these discoveries that could very well help brain injury victims will never become medicines, because creating a medicine requires investment that can be hundreds of millions of dollars by the time it receives regulatory approval. There is not a single investor on Earth who will fund a project like that when anyone else can replicate the work once it proves successful.

As biomedical researchers, we're sort of trained to believe in the dogma that we do science for its own sake, and that it is wrong (morally) to do it for profit motive. However, there are other concerns beyond profit motive, as illustrated above. If we don't protect our inventions properly, then they might make for a nice paper, but they'll never help anyone.

You learn this lesson a couple times, and it becomes clear that any time you discover something that is even potentially helpful as a medicament, then you should look into patenting it. The point of translational research is to help people. If you're spending the government's or a foundation's money and making your best effort at helping people, then you're just wasting resources. That's why it's immoral.