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Absolutely. When I want to cut out the noise I use my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones. I also like to relax with a soothing Ritalin 20mg, now available over the counter in your local pharmacy.

But this generally isnt as you say it. Pharmecuticals only spend 15% of their revenue on research, as reported in their own statements[1]. And then of that the majority goes to evading each others patents, not actual science of any sorts. Most of the money and research is done with public money from the NIH and such, and done on a competitive bidding system with publicly available papers, none of this requires the current type of pharmecutical system, structured only on new drugs, and on patents. If we got rid of that model we would be able to spend more on research, less on health care (of which alot is government money), treat people better, AND get rid of the horrible pharmaceutical advertising that takes most of those companies budgets and disgraces the medical profession.

The US does have a amazing public funding for research, but i dont think that is so heavily linked to the medical system as you make it out to be, at least in the pharmaceutical world.

[1]
http://www.novartis.com/downloads/investors/reports/AR06_E_web.pdf - p 143
http://www.pfizer.com/pfizer/annualreport/2006/financial/p2006fin13.jsp
http://www.astrazeneca.com/article/11183.aspx

Big biting flies, 2-3cm; could keep up with a 20km/hr cyclist. Got situated before biting, so if you were quick enough, could swat them away. Seemed to be gone if it was too cold.

Small biting flies; not a problem when traveling but a problem when camping

Just get a jar of Sanka http://www.shopping.com/xDN-food_and_drinks-sanka_ coffee and make it medium weak. Then, grind up two No-Doz http://www.novartis.com/consumerhealth/OTC/NoDoz.s html and a Commit Nicotine lozenge http://www.commitlozenge.com/ and put them in the coffee. Chase it with some Tequila, and that's all you need every morning to get you ready to take on the world. The ENTIRE world.

what do you think the ratio of new drug research is to profits? For a major drug company? Conversely, what do you think the ratio of marketing vs profits? Got a clue? No? Feel free to go do a little googling.

Here are the Financial Highlights from the annual reports of Novartis, Pfizer and AstraZeneca. They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing and profits.

So the standard argument for granting patent monopolies and allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for the patented drugs - that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs - is simply not true.

The organization Doctors Without Borders gives an example of how pharmaceutical patents affect prices i a recent press release:

The case of AIDS illustrates the trend. While fierce generic competition has helped prices for first-line AIDS drug regimen to fall by 99% from $10,000 to roughly $130 per patient per year since 2000, prices for second-line drugs - which patients need as resistance develops naturally - remain high due to increased patent barriers in key generics producing countries like India.

To the western world, pharmaceutical patents mean an enormous waste of money. In the third world, it's lives that are wasted instead. It's time to think about an alternative.

And alternatives exist - plenty of them, in fact. Nobel prize winner Joseph E Stiglitz has made one proposal. The Swedish Pirate Party has made another (or essentially the same, actually). Economist Dean Baker has collected four others, that also run along the same lines.

It's time to open up a global discussion about the effects of pharmaceutical patents, and the alternatives. Today's system is not only grossly immoral, it is also expensive and wasteful. It's time for a better way. Pharmaceutical patents kill.

For example, in a recent press release they write:

The case of AIDS illustrates the trend. While fierce generic competition has helped prices for first-line AIDS drug regimen to fall by 99% from $10,000 to roughly $130 per patient per year since 2000, prices for second-line drugs - which patients need as resistance develops naturally - remain high due to increased patent barriers in key generics producing countries like India.

The standard argument for allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for patented drugs, is that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs. But that is not true.

We can look at the numbers for Novartis, Pfizer or AstraZeneca.

They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing an profits.

So there are clearly better ways to finance drug research than to hand out patent monopolies to the big pharma companies, and hope that they will spend the money they make on research. Because clearly, they don't.

The Swedish Pirate Party has one proposal for an alternative system. Many others have suggested other alternatives.

But at least it is time for us to start discussing the problem in earnest. Today's situation is expensive, wasteful and completely immoral. There must be a better way.

If you don't want patents, then the alternative is government R&D labs, possible using outsourced development services.

Often, when you listen to patent proponents/apologists, they will paint a picture suggesting that if there were no patents, there would be no pharmaceutical reserch at all carried out in the world. This is of course pure rubbish.

Just as you point out, the governments of the first world countries could just as well fund the research directly if they wanted. They have the power to decide if the want to have patents or not, and if they want to spend precious police resources on enforcing them. And it is the governments who are footing most of the pharmaceutical bill anyway, through Medicare/Medicaid in the US, and through universal medical coverage in Europe, Canada and Japan.

So there is no natural law that says that patents are the only way to get new drugs developed. If governments were to fund the research directly and make the results freely available, that would be at least as reasonable a model as the current one, with state enforced monopolies for the pharmaceutical companies.

The relevant question to ask is which model would provide the cheapest and most efficient way to fund pharmaceutical research. You are touching on this subject when you write:

[T]he development services would charge a pretty penny for their work

However, considering that it already is the governments that are providing most of the income for the pharmaceutical industry, a first step would be to examine how much of the money actually goes to research.

This is very easily done, since all the big pharma companies have their annual reports available on the web. As an example, I googled Novartis and had a look at their numbers.

They spend 15% of their revenue on research. The other 85% goes to other stuff, according to their own figures. The numbers are typical for the industry.

So the question is: is the patent system really giving us, the taxpayers, the maximum amount of medical research for the money we are spending on drugs? Or is there room for improvement, when even the pharma companies themselves admit to spending 85% of the money we give them on other things?

I'm not necessarily saying I have the answer, but I think it's a question well worth asking.

I fully agree. The problem here is that Novartis is presenting the photos more for their beauty than for their scientific information. That insults the thinking that goes into science. The real beauty of science is the thinking, not pretty pictures.

The whole thing is probably designed by a public relations agency to get free publicity for Novartis. Probably there is no one at the P.R. agency who has any interest in or respect for scientific investigation. However, that theory means that Novartis is out of control, or very much willing to mislead, because someone in top management at Novartis should have realized what they were doing was a mistake.

Certainly my opinion of Novartis has worsened.

In emergencies, European doctors inject hydergine directly into the carotid artery to protect the brain. Hydergine's mechanisms of actions include the reduction in the rate of lipofuscin deposition in brain cells, increased metabolism of brain cells by improving ATP synthesis and protection to the brain from free radical damage. [1]

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• National Australia Bank Click "Register Now" and you get a "Your Browser Version is not supported"
• CN Rail North America's Railroad (Excluding non-NS6 users).
• Bank Of America Try to apply for a gold card and the form gets screwed up.
• Benjamin Moore Sorry our page is designed for IE only, buy your paint elsewhere.
• Novartis Screwed up rendering.
• Connectsite Exchange, Collaborate, Connect! Unless of course your using a non IE browser, then go away.

This isn't counting the 1720 Tech Evangelism bugs that have already been resolved. Sites like salomonsmithbarney.com, yahoo.com, cbs.com, citrix.com and many many more have all resolved improper coding issues that screwed up non IE rendering. But the positive news is that in 1720 cases web administrators have changed their websites to make them unbroken.

Here's an example. One of the most highly reported bugs (bug 114812) that has since been fixed was with hotmail. Due to faulty javascript implementation if you would select the "ALL MESSAGES" box in your inbox only one message would actually be selected, so to delete the mountains of spam that accumulate daily you had to click the box beside _each_individual_message_. Clicking 200 checkboxes after not checking your mailbox for a few days does not a fun time make. Anyway after about 6 months of pestering microsoft finally fixed it. The moral: If complaining can make Microsoft make its pages standards compliant well the sky's the limit.

Anyway if you want to do something to help check out Mozilla Evangelism The site is chock full of advice about how to report and deal with non-compliant websites. You can even use the Letter Writing Tool to write and send a nifty letter to website administrators who haven't yet seen the light. Obviously the site is geared to getting things to work properly in Mozilla, but the fact is, things tend to work in Mozilla if they are standards compliant.

I like Google; it weeds out most of the spam -- unlike AltaVista. It isn't perfect, though. I once searched for prostate milking, after reading this. The search results were quite interesting: It brought up hundreds of, apparently fake, headlines ("Located here! Prostate Milking") and domain names ("childhood-disease.accurate-health.com/prostate-m ilking.html"); it in fact still does, even though a month has passed since. Many of the links don't work, but some redirect you to other sites (this one amazingly owned by Novartis, a supposedly "respectable" biotechnology company). Question: How do they do this?

That's right. It's as easy to get as candy, and even goes by the street name "skittles". And there's no nasty underground or illegal connotations to go along with it. For $1 to $5, you get the tablet, crush it up, and snort away.

School Nurses across the country trot from class to class, handing this stuff out like an afternoon snack. It's closely related to Methamphetamines, and has an almost identical list of side effects and warnings.

In addition, it is interesting to note that Ciba Geigy (now part of Novartis), which manufactures the stuff, has done a wonderfully covert job of marketing this stuff at parents across the country, by funnelling about a million dollars through the supposedly "grass roots" organization CHADD, which aims to "educate" the public about ADD. In much the same way that the manufacturers of Listerine "educated" the populus about a "disease" called halcytosis. AKA bad breath, about a hundred years ago.

So pop a few tablets in your kids, cure them of their impulsivity, and creativity. Drop them in front of the nearest Cathode Ray Tube, and voila! Parenting can be done even by idiots. And so it is (not that they were prevented from doing it before mind you...)

It's soma. Pure and simple. Brave new world, here we come...

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John, this was one of your worst articles.

Who is José Bové, and is he admirable?

He is a Frenchman who was born in Bordeaux in 1953, and grew up at Berkeley, as his parents studied Biochem. Back in France, he refused to do his military service and dropped out of Bordeaux University to immerse himself in various leftist political and ecological movements. In 1975 he and his wife decided to move to the country, take up sheep farming and join a local peasant movement (Confédération paysanne), which he terms 'a trade union', though I do not understand in what sense he means this) against a plan to extend an army base in southern France. He was arrested for "invading" the base during a 1976 protest, and he spent three weeks in prison. (The military project was canceled five years later, more due to the economy than nanything else

In 1998, he blew up up a silo (which belonged to the pharmaceutical firm Novartis) because it contained genetically modified corn. Here's Mssr. Bove's own statement about his actions and motives. It appears to have been written in English, or at least be an authorized translation. I haven't found a French original or variant translations.

In 1999, he became a 'national hero' (according to his supporters -- he's certainly a cult figure) for damaging an unfinished McDonalds with a bulldozer, and later organizing a massive giveaway of Roquefort cheese to protest US import restrictions. He also is known for staging 'illegal' free Roquefort and French bread picnics in front to McDonald's during the WTO protests in Seattle. Distributing the cheese was 'illegal' because it was unpasteurized. Time magazine did a piece on him

But he's not in jail for the bulldozer attack. he spent 20 days in jail for that in 1999. He calls that the greatest favor the judge could have done, due to the publicity it gave him.

On Wednesday, April 19, 2000, an attack on a McDonald's resulted in the death of a '28 year-old waitress'. Jose Bove is believed to have ordered this attack. He has always proclaimmed his movement (Confédération paysanne) to be nonviolent, but admits that violent means have been used, and often refers to the groups actions as 'combat' (same in French as English) I found a French account of the attack that you can babelfish, if necessary

I also found an 12/99 interview where he outlines his current views. He is not an ultra-liberal (in fact he denounced ultraliberalism as 'suicidal'), his personal views are a patchwork of conflicting insistence on individualism and collectivism, (which becomes harder for me to render coherently, the more I read) Politically, he opposes 'internationalization' and insists that 'each nation has a right to choose what it wants to eat' (he supports French Bans on US food, while protesting US bans on French foods)

I leave an analysis of his ideology to others -- anyone but Katz.

And let's not forget the fungicide named UNIX (alas, www.novartis.com isn't responding, so I can't check to see whether the Novartis page cited in that item is still there).