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Former Intel CEO Rips Medical Research
Himuanam writes "Former Intel CEO Grove rips on the medical research community, contrasting their lack of progress with the tech industry's juggernaut of breakthroughs over the past half-century or so. 'On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.'"
The only reason Intel has had any motivation to come up with any real breakthroughs in the last 20 years is AMD eating their lunch with the Opetron. All they had in 2003 was the Itanium and we all know how big of a turd that was.
1. Pharma companies need to make a profit. If they are making a profit doing what they are, they have met that goal.
2. Human body isn't made of silicon.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I feel a car analogy coming on...
Let's talk about the failure of Itanic.
I don't think that the IT industry has the regulatory pressures that the medical industry has, so he isn't comparing like with like.
You break all the laws of physics and you seriously think there wouldn't be a price?
And that's the way it ought to be. Not all things need immediate applications. Many of the most impressive inventions of our time have been a fusion of research that seemingly have few worthwhile applications. Expanding the sum of human knowledge is never a waste of time.
From the article
The fundamental tenet that drives us all in the semiconductor industry is a deeply felt conviction that what matters is time to market, or time to money. But you never hear an executive from a pharmaceutical company say, "Before the end of the year I'm going to have xyz drug," the way Steve Jobs said the iPhone would be out on schedule. The heart of every high-tech executive has been, get the product into customers' hands and ramp up production. That drive is just not present in pharma; the drive to get sufficient understanding and go for it is missing.
Let me tell you, if Intel had to pay $5,000,000 to the widow of everyone killed by an FDIV bug who would have died 3 weeks later (eg, like a drug company has to do), they would be a lot more conservative about getting chips to market.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Biomedical is a cross between fundamental research, medical research and pharma. The fundamental researchers stumble across things that move through the pipe to pharma. Without them and their "content in writing grants to the NIH", many breakthrough drugs would not exist.
The medical establishment fears change in some ways. We still don't have computerized medical records in the US. If you become incapacitated away from home it's very likely no one will have any idea what medical conditions you may have or what you're allergic to.
Former Intel CEO rips automotive industry for not doubling fuel efficiency and halving cost every 18 months.
I can hardly imagine what the medical profession would be like had it been subjected to the so-called progress and innovation we've been cursed with in the tech industry in the past couple of decades, but the possibilities are horrifying. Microsoft Doctor? Intel Inside? Intestinal Exploder? "rights management" for your medications? Nursing outsourced to call centers? No thanks, Andy.
Unlike chip makers, pharmaceutical companies need a national government's approval to market their product. How quickly would Intel and AMD have been able to step up the capabilities of their processors if some Digital Restrictions Ministry or some other government agency had to approve every stepping?
Why should we care about dumb things like curing cancer when we can make faster processors for computers with less sand?!
First, given the current regulation scheme (the FDA in the US, for example) the distance between a fundamental discovery and an actual drug on the market is much greater in medicine than it is in technology -- Intel does not require approval from anyone to market their next-gen processor. Second, the current patent system makes making trivial improvements on existing drugs (hence extending monopoly protection) much more profitable than researching new drugs (high risk of failing to produce anything).
But even ignoring all these things, on a fundamental level biology is orders of magnitude more difficult than physics. We understand the physics of seminconductors and the mathematics of computation fairly well. We can simulate future processors ahead of time to see if a new cache design will improve performance or not. We have no idea how to simulate a biological system, and barely have quantitative models for event the simplest ones. Let's give it 100 years and try again.
In other words, please start inventing faster because I don't want to die a trembling mess.
In all seriousness, I hope that he gets them moving, and that such cures are not only for folks with Groves' wallet.
Well Andy, Maybe the human body is just many many times more complex than a calculator.
And it's news that the Pharms would prefer to treat the symptoms rather than cure a disease? There's no money in cures. But keeping people buying pills to treat symptoms - or better yet - reclassifying symptoms as new diseases. Now you're talkin' the shareholder's language baby!
Otherwise it's all just an order for another box of a half-dozen duh's. To go.
We don't understand the human body. We don't know how some drugs even work. It isn't like a computer that we built from scratch ourselves. Two people of exactly the same body mass and type will react differently to the same drug, and we usually don't know why. We haven't mapped the genome, and when we finish mapping it, we won't understand it. We don't know why aging happens. We don't know what causes many diseases. We don't know where viruses came from or how to stop them.
Medical science is mostly things we don't know, so we stick to the few we do and research the heck out of them. Also, Big Pharma aren't interested in cures. Cures hurt profits. They research treatments, not cures. That's what I'd hope is the main point of a rant against Big Pharma. They are paid to keep people sick, but mask the symptoms, not to actually make them well.
Learn to love Alaska
Hey there! I'm in an unrelated field and I don't know how to do your job, but here's a few changes I'd like to see anyway....
So Mr. Grove, let's consider all the faulty products you shipped in just one year of your career at Intel--and now let's imagine every single customer that bought one of those products suing your company for a half-million dollars each, and winning....
~
Sorry but I don't feel that Intel has a huge record of innovation.
Intel is making X86 cpus. They are very fast but they are still X86 CPUS. The still work on data in the same way as the 386 did but much faster. MMX and SSE? they are tacked on DSP instructions. What Intel and the other IC companies have done is just evolve basic digital logic circuits. They still use gates and work in binary. Take a look at things like the survival rate of cancer over the last 20 years and the survival rate for premature births and I think will see some major increases.
Also when Intel makes a chip that doesn't work correctly hundreds of people usually don't die. If your MP3 player or PC locks up you just reboot it. If the drug you are taking locks up your Liver then bad things happen.
In other words he really doesn't have a clue to what he is talking about.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
How would you like medicines that make you overheat and go up in smoke if you don't wear proper water cooling? Psychiatric medications that make you repeat the Pentium FDIV bug when balancing your checkbook? A defect rate that sends 10% of people from hospital right into garbage can and forces many more to be retested for lower brain clock frequency?
True, things that have to work change much slower than our entertainment equipment and office accessories. Cars, airplanes and medicines take a looong time to develop and test for safety. But there is a damn good reason for that.
On the other hand, I believe informed adults should be able to do whatever case modding and overclocking they want to do on themselves. The rest of us will watch and see how it affects their clock frequency and mean time to failure.
Don't knock it, mate. That Viagra is great stuff. Could be one of the defining inventions of our time. Seriously, think about the number of marriages that have hit the rocks because the girl (usually younger) can't get all of her needs satisfied anymore. One drug has made that a thing of the past.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
His argument is not without merit though. There is no financial interest in developing new drugs when old drugs are still protected under obscenely long lasting patents. And researchers are, as researchers are. I highly doubt many of the silicon engineers are eagerly awaiting news of how Timmy used their latest creation to do his high school term paper on. Like whys, most researchers are likely more interested in continuing their research than the 5-20 year battle what ever their last findings will go through before becoming a commercial grade product.
All of that could be put aside though, save for one major factor. There is a HUGE amount of money in the pharmaceutical world. And the sad fact is, more of that money goes to crap like Viagra commercials during the Super Bowl than to the research and development of new drugs and treatments.
I'm not saying everyone in the industry is a greedy whore, heck, I've met and worked with some really great people who are in it for the cures. But the privatization of research, the excessive burden of patents, and the big-business/lobbyist friendly approach of our government over the last 2+ decades have lead to a slowing of development and a maximization of profits.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If someone actually cured the diseases, they wouldn't be making billions selling drugs for them.
God spoke to me.
OK, so Grove compares apples and oranges, and the liabilities involved with testing medical "studd" are way higher than with microprocessors and other tech stuff... all that and more... but I, in my hart of hearts, feel he has a point. I often wonder what, really, does modern medicine manage to really solve? Diabetes? Nope. Cancer? Nope. Arthrytis? Nope. Ostheoporosis? No. MS? No. etc. (keep that flamethrower down, damn!) I volunteer helping blind people, and just happen to know many eye diseases that are uncurable.
It's a bit depressing, considering it's one of the oldest sciences.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Perhaps the following metaphor is not the most effective, when discussing the field of medicine:
We need to give wild ducks the opportunity to emerge and quack their way to success.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Maybe Intel and others of the "tech juggernaut" would be singing a different tune if they had to:
1. Get government approval before selling anything. This approval only comes after spending hundreds of millions to billions to open a new fabrication plant and start cranking out brand new designs of chips.
2. Had Hillary and other politicians running around talking about the "unconscionable profits of Intel", and how the government should nationalize Intel and other high tech corporations "for the common good." Or nationalize in all but name only, with the government deciding how much profit Intel should be "permitted" to make, so computers don't cost so much to people (which is ridiculous, but if people believe that about drugs and medicine, why not bleeding edge electronics?)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There's far more monetary incentive to treat a disease than to cure it.
...lawsuits.
Other technology innovation is comparitively quick and easy, because most of their products don't directly affect the human body. At worst, a failed design of a piece of technology may lead to a recall.
Biomedical products directly impact human lives, and even the smallest problem may end up causing harmful effects only realized several years down the road. The threat of potential lawsuits lead biomedical companies to undergo significantly more testing than most other technologies require. A new biomedical product may need many years of testing to be ultimately deemed safe.
If you want them to speed up that design process, then we as consumers would need to be more willing to accept risk, and that is something that the general public is definitely not willing to do. The moment anyone feels wronged in even the least way, they'll contact a lawyer and sue.
Had his opinion been a comment he'd be rightfully modded -1 troll or something to that effect because there is no -1 factually inccorect mod. He assumes that medical science is anything at all comparable to computer science as far as progress. Even if it was, he seems pretty ignorant of how far medical science is advancing. When it was first possible to record the entirety of a genome we were limited to a few hundred or less base pairs a day. Now we can decode over a hundred million per day. I would call that one heck of an improvement. We can figure out the structure of proteins and enzymes a lot faster and more accurately than in the past and are making decent progress modeling and designing new proteins. We now have the capability to encode for numerous artificial amino acids and aree working on developing artificial lifeforms using more than the 4 standard nucleotide bases. DNA-based computers are on the drawing board and simple prototypes have been built. The predicted storage capacity of these kind of systems is TRILLIONS of times what Intel could dream of making. Time to catch up Intel.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
"...he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways."
What absolute horseshit. Has he _been_ to a meeting on, say, cancer research recently? I have. And I'll tell you that the vast majority of Big Pharma and academic researchers with NIH grants are working their asses off to develop the Next Big Drug. Not only are there public health reasons involved, but also big financial reasons as well. I've seen amazing things thrown at problems: room-sized robots screening chemical libraries, natural product extractions from flora and fauna harvested by divers from the sea floor, massive computer time and effort thrown into drug design, data mining of the literature of known compounds and their interaction partners, ultra-precise radiation delivery systems involving whole-body imaging...in other words, _huge_ technological efforts costing millions--nay, billions of dollars to develop treatments for cancer.
And you know what the net result is? We're still using drugs and techniques mostly discovered in the '60's to the '70's. Why? Because despite all of these efforts, we haven't found anything that works better. And that's the important thing. It has to work better. Not as good as. Better. Nothing much does.
There's luck involved. Things like Viagra come along not because we _designed_ it to be an ED drug (in fact, it was originally a treatment for high blood pressure), but because it was _discovered_ to be an ED treatment. You can say "I'm going to have a drug to treat prostate cancer by the next Apple Developers Conference" all you want, but it ain't gonna happen unless you get amazingly lucky.
Pharma is not the semiconductor industry because people are not machines.
You jerks! You're nowhere near as awesome as the tech industry!
What? You can't just rip a human body apart and see how it works? If a person "blue screens" or has a "floating point error" they're dead?
Whoops. forget it, then...
No innovations in the past 50 years?! Christ on a cracker! We have Viagra, birth control and even pills that help curb obesity! We had none of those drugs to help the problems that these drugs treat 50 years ago! Nuff said...
The game.
Just look at this article at wired where they claim that using lasers is possible to destroy virus using their own resonant frequency. Btw asking the medical industry to innovate is like asking Microsoft to innovate... if they really do what will they sell next ? Google or some other really caring company has to step in to solve this problem for humanity. Big companies have the chance to change everything for the best and yet all they can think of is the profit... No wonder the other species in the universe want to stay anonymous.
With computer research (either hardware or software), going from idea to demo to production sample is a fairly straightforward investment of money and labor hours. If it works, it works, and if not, you try again. No harm done.
With medical research (either equipment or chemicals), every one of those steps is harder:
Right now software and technology companies have to compete with Biotech for investment dollars so this should really matter to /. Andy is right that the current players in pharma aren't really creating much new and are simply patenting tiny (and obvious) baby steps. One thing Andy isn't pointing out is what every terrible corporate disease movie will tell you: it isn't in biotech's financial interest to find true cures. Symptomatic treatments can be sold thousands of times instead of the one time a cure is sold.
-- $G
As a post-doc in the biological sciences, here's my two cents:
First, the reason certain diseases haven't been cured while computer chips have gotten smaller and faster is that curing the diseases is a much harder problem.
I do, however, have opinions about how to improve the pace of scientific research. In my view, the key to improving the pace of scientific research is to reduce accountability. What I mean by that is to adopt an open source model where people join projects because they believe in the project rather than because that's what pays the bills.
What needs to happen is that rather than getting assigned to a particular grant, researchers are given a basic package of funding and then they are free to attach themselves to the most promising projects. As it is, the system is so rigid that the successful projects are unable to grow and the unsuccessful projects linger long past the point where it is clear that they have failed.
Considering the fat that the average pharmaceutical company invests 20% of their earnings into R&D (and mot of them don't even research new things) compared to the 50% that go into advertising campaigns/bribing doctors one should really wonder if there might be some misunderstanding here.
Besides, pharmaceuticals are the biggest patent trolls known to man. Just change two functional groups of an already known (and cheap) drug that already proved to be anti-cancerous and starting to market it as a new cancer drug nets Roche a hundred times more money per pill than the old generic one.
Paul Graham and Mark Cuban were busy?
This sig is alpha and shouldn't be viewed on production machines
It is worth noting that intel doesn't make use of patents while biotech heavily relies on them. So much for "patents are needed to push r&d".
\u262D = \u5350
He's a rich man who is getting sick and old, and he's mad because it has turned out to be hard to find out how to stop people from getting sick and old. He's upset, and I understand that, but he also missed most of the points that might be out there to get.
No question that medicine is a different culture than engineering. I've spent a lot of time in both, and I know. I also know that medicine is NOT particularly creative, and you don't really want it to be. You want your illness to be routine and fixable, and being routine means that nobody has to sweat particularly hard to figure it out. The sweat, and there's plenty, has to be done in research and development, and the difference in development effort between a new therapy for a disease and a new electronic entertainment device is remarkable.
He talks about how the two cultures deal with failure. In engineering, particularly in microelectronics, failure means that you spend money, time, and energy fixing something you broke. In medicine, failure means that you kill somebody. This used to happen a lot, and the modern biomedical research culture is highly biased against failure. It's not OK to die in a study any more, even if the condition we're studying is in and of itself fatal. Changing this would speed up the process of research, but who's volunteering to die for the cause? (And no, offshoring it is NOT the answer - foreign governments are wising up to this quickly, as are domestic ethics consultants.)
He derides modern statistical techniques, misunderstanding the difference between statistical failure and subgroup averaging, and he flatters himself a prophet when he recommends something that pharmaceutical researchers have been doing for thirty years: analyzing failure to see if you can find partial success somewhere.
He writes off in a sentence or two the hardest problem of all, which is figuring out what in the heck is really going on (preparatory to changing it). In engineering, the complexity is finite and human-directed, and the systems are designed with severable components to make the process of debugging and analysis easier. In medicine, the complexity is engineered by a billion years of evolution, not all of it productive or even useful, and very poorly understood. In an organism such as people, where 50,000 poorly-understood genes interact with factorial complexity, just figuring out which end to push on can be maddening. It's the reason that peer review was invented: if you're up a creek with a paddle-less enzyme, there are probably only a few hundred people in the world who can tell whether you're a genius or just confused. Peer review at its best is just like open source. At it's worst it's a lot like open source at it's worst, but the less said of that the better.
I would love to see more acceptance of modern information techniques and more flexibility in medical research. I would love to see better use of rapid prototyping and model systems, and we're heading that way. We've actually come a huge way in medicine just in the last decades, and the pace is accelerating. TFA is just a measure of the fact that, just like software, sometimes the better the system gets, the more you can see how imperfect it is.
(misquoting shamelessly from memory)
PHB: I figure that anything I don't understand can't be that hard. "Reengineer our world-wide network topology: 30 minutes."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I'd like to see what Intel's rate of advancement would have been if their research involved in vitro or in vivo testing, with risk of death.
I agree that he's not really comparing like to like, but he might have a point. What was the last disease that we cured? When was that? Granted curing a disease is probably a lot harder than designing a new CPU (both of which I have no experience with). With all the stuff we hear about Viagra, Cialis... it's enough to make a person wonder. On a positive note, I have heard some cool things going on, like regrowing tissues and temporary blood cell replacements. I forget the name, but it was on Wired News on PBS last week.
Former Intel CEO rips farming industry (agrobiz) for not doubling crop production and havling cost every 18 months.
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Nope, you can't generalize from one industry to another as simply as that, can you?
Wait, so the money guy accuses the academics of being to, well, academic?
Film at 11...
Hire me...
Andy Grove is very correct. Let me know where I can read or listen to his speech.
My perspective is from having rheumatoid arthritis (RA). I have RA for five years now. Its always bubbling up so really impacts me. Got fired from my last job due to this.
In the RA arena researchers don't know the cause. Same thing for cancer and a host of other diseases. In a computer system, if you don't know the cause, its hard to fix. One first level drug, methorexate dials down the whole immune system to target RA. Then more recent biologic drugs work pretty well. I have the feeling that I could eat something different, like amino acids, to impact how my epigenetic code is exercised. Research like Andy Grove suggests is the only way to find out the truth here.
God bless you Andy Grove! And God bless the biologic companies too, they do help.
Jim
basicly it started in the back yard and still and had a very low cost to enter the market, all you needed was a good idea and it could take off quickly.
even now there are hardware companies that spring up and use the free market in semiconductor plants to prduce their chips and make the money to recoup their investment reasoably quickly, the best design wins and the capitalist system is proved right.
medical break throughs take decades of development and testing and many millions in development costs/bribs
i would also bet a chip engineer has a totally different work mentality to a research scientist.
At least not yet, it doesn't. But there are many aspects of it that are emerging that come closer to approaching the rate of progress you see in the tech industry. The pace of technological advancement in recent decades has been facilitated by Moore's Law. Only recently has the medical community been able begin taking advantage of this. Now there are advancements like imaging/MRI systems doubling the number of "slices" they can scan simultaneously, every so often, use of microchips to detect cancer markers, etc. Andy Kessler wrote a book about this convergence called The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/17/1623217&from=rss http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006113029X/andykessler-20
Although some will have differing views on this, I agree with him in many ways. Pharmaceutical companies will only make something if they feel that it will make a big profit, and then they simply milk the income. You can't blame them for that, but it doesn't equal progress.
Academic researchers are the worst though. Many people who I have met who have existed in a pure academic world, especially in the medical world, are quite simply, utterly detached from the real world and solutions that have a practical application. I have seen academic, medical research first-hand. It never ceases to astonish me how seemingly intelligent people just cannot work out how to apply their knowledge to what is actually going on in the world. Many medical people seem to think that it is enough that they are just simply there. How many billions have been poured into medical research worldwide? How many major discoveries have we really had over the last few decades? Most academic research groups are there to collect their grants, and to come up with a discovery every now and again when their grant is up or their survival is threatened. Thinking of fund raising for medical research? Think again. It's a bottomless well.
There a limitations in medical research, and you can't quite have a time-to-market slant on things as the computer industry does, but medical research from various groups is relatively stagnant.
which makes it much easier to grab the low hanging fruit. The history of medicine goes back thousands of years and is much more "mature". Any industry accomplishes a lot when it is young, that seems to be the nature of the game. Look at airplanes. There was less than 50 years between the flight at Kitty hawk and testing the first jets. But how much have planes improved in the past 50 years? Not nearly as much because it gets harder and harder to find places to improve. Boeing's all composite design is pretty revolutionary, but it only achieves about a 20% increase in efficiency at best. Same with medicine.
Medicine is also chasing a moving target much more than say microchips are. There are always going to be new challenges in tech, but once a problem is "solved" in the computer world, it tends to stay that way. Compare that to what medical researchers have to deal with. As seen in the news, bacteria and viruses evolve. Malaria is a constantly moving target. Much harder to chase a moving target than a still one.
Monstar L
Medical research isn't about curing, its about profit!
The CEO of "Market the Megahertz" Intel should know that.
Of course Moore, "That Nobel Prize should have been shared!", was a whiner, so what do you expect from his buddy.
This has been pointed out by numerous commentators in the past:
medical regulatory bodies generally tend to reject new technology, even if individual patients are willing to accept the risks.
The usual logic for this is that if the regulating agency approves anything new that leads to the death of people, the regulatory agency gets blamed well for that--but if they refuse to approve a new medicine for use, nobody knows the true cost of doing that--how many people it would have saved. So from a practical standpoint, it's safer for them not to approve anything new.
~
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
There has been enormous progress in medicine: imaging, diagnostics, genetics, drug treatments, surgical techniques, etc. Many medical problems that used to be serious are now treatable, preventable, or manageable. The one thing medical science can't do is extend life much, but that's because people are basically evolved for living around 70 years, and after that, many things go wrong at once.
Intel, however, is a different story. Until Intel came along, there was a wide variety of processor designs, programming languages, runtimes, and a strong interest in parallel computation. By pushing the x86 architecture, Intel has killed off two decades of work in parallel programming, new programming languages, and many other areas.
Grove and Gates should be remembered as the Genghis Khans of the 20th century: uncivilized, destructive, opportunistic hordes that became fabulously rich and powerful by plundering other civilization, and creating little of lasting value.
Biomedical sciences advanced quickly when there was much room for progress (20th century). But when most natural sources of possible cures were analyzed, the gap became visible. It means that we need to find and understand a chemical mechanism which might be effective and then synthetize a complex molecules and structures, and that's very challenging (compared to culturing funghi). Yes, using living organisms (advanced chemical factories) can help medicine to some extent (wonder why vaccines are effective), but doing it in a lab, or worse, factory is much harder. For that reason we are decades away from times when there will be cures widely available for most common diseases (e.g. most common cancer types).
).
1. Medical research usually takes ten years from basic research discovery to delivery precisely because:
... human ... and so we care if they live or die).
a. Humans have long lifespans (initial studies are done with worms, mice, and shorter lifespan creatures)
b. Genomes and pathways don't always map from one creature to a human
c. Human systems have feedback mechanisms - there is not just one biochemical pathway in play, but many
d. Side effects differ between individuals (we are not all identical like chips that are fabbed)
e. Some side effects won't show up for years
2. Risk ratio is different. If I kill a robot, no one cares much. If a kid dies from a medical drug interaction that we failed to test, it will be a big deal.
3. Part of the problem is the broken patent system.
4. Part of the problem is that medical costs for drug trials are high - people cost money, you have to monitor many things over many years, people don't want invasive monitoring and we can't force them to all eat the same thing, get the same exercise, and live exactly the same way like we can do with mice.
5. The real barriers are lack of financing at the base level, and the fact we deal with humans (if we discover a drug cures cancer we frequently stop the people who are on placebo from treatment and give everyone the drug - this is because they're
6. Biomedical stuff is not bitwise. No easy On/Off or 1/2/3/4/5/6 answers. Things are growing and in flux as you measure them and the act of measuring impacts how they behave. The number of cells in a tube alters as they are counted - even with high-speed mechanical counting imaging - is a cell about to split one or two?.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A while ago Grove was ranting about the bar-code system for blood banks and going on about how they should be replaced with RFIDs. One Intel employee who actually had run a hospital blood bank pointed out that those bar-codes are readable by candlelight. When lives are at stake, you do not introduce unnecessary complications into the system.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Intel doesn't have to spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars getting FDA approval.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Poor spelling? Nope.
On a more serious note, there are advances in treating diabetes. Twenty years ago, diabetics had to use insulin from pigs or cows. Cancer survival rates are WAY up. You lump cancer into one disease when it is really hundreds. Those are the ones I know just a bit about, but the fact of the matter is that there IS plent of progress on a whole raft of diseases, but there is no magic "take and live forever" pill.
As for your last comment, two points: 1) one expects that the oldest sciences make the slowest progress because the lowest hanging fruit has been picked. 2) Modern medicine is not that old. One could reasonably pick the 1930's (penicillin) or the 1960's (DNA) as the beginning of modern medicine. A lot of what went on before that was science in the same way that alchemy is science.
Curing many diseases is completely impossible without some sort of nanomachinery entering every cell in the body and checking/repairing its DNA. (Removing retrovirus code, restoring tumor suppressor genes, etc.) Not to mention that there are many disease for which, if anyone developed a real cure, they'd be instant trillionaires. And how is a pill supposed to repair the nerve cell damage causing this guy's Parkinson's? Stem cell therapy might help, but...
You know what is ironic? Computer hardware is a major limiter of research; imagine that. Calculating the most stable structure and interactions between proteins is very computationally intensive. Excluding super-efficient mathematical methods [unlikely] we are stuck with *his* hardware to do the job. If he wants to attack something for his perceived lack of medical progress, he better start cracking on the better hardware so that we can do our work.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The medical community does suck.
I have hypothyroidism. What's the cure? I take a hormone for the rest of my life.. one that makes the drug companies money and forces me to be a life-long customer. It's like smoking - but more expensive.
Fuck the medical community.. Being treated the rest of your life and a cure are two completely seperate things.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
There's a big difference between applying tools to solve a problem (engineering) and developing those tools from observation of existing systems (science). Someone should remind Andy that the entire information technology industry is still based on understandings of electromagnetism and optics that date back more than 100 years. In contrast, we only learned about DNA about 50 years ago.
Imagine trying to learn about computers by starting from scratch with a Core 2 Duo chip. Now multiply that by 1,000 and you have the human genome. And that doesn't even get into the more complex firmware, software, viruses, etc. of biological systems.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"There is no financial interest in developing new drugs when old drugs are still protected under obscenely long lasting patents."
By the time a drug gets through FDA approval, over 10 years of your patent life is gone. That's before yopu've sold the first pill. So now your are left with less than ten years to reocover billions in R&D money. Without patents there would be no pharmaceutical industry.
Check. Intel Inside? Intel Research has developed the ultimate baby monitor for neurotic parents.
Working on it... Intestinal Exploder? Not hits as of yet... "rights management" for your medications? competing hospitals are choosing not to install viewers that would allow MD's to look at films that were taken at their competition
They're still working on DRM'ing the Doctors, but they'll get to the patients soon enough. Nursing outsourced to call centers? Telemedicine and Telehealth Links - Call Centers
and
Using Telephone Support to Manage Chronic Disease
Already a booming business, get your medical help by phone!
Why, I always get my regular mental check-up from Dr Sbaitso
I'm still waiting for that Star Wars 'droid to get me that mechanical hand, though.
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
Who the hell died and made this A$$hole God? First of all, his comments demonstrates his total lack of understanding in regard to biomedical research. he obviously has never done any hardcore molecular, cell, or Biochemicial work. These 'academics' he accuses of laziness do not get paid any where near the obscene amounts of money the CEO's make, be they in biotech or IT. These are dedicated people who put in anywhere from 70-100+ hours a week for what amounts to peanuts (70-80 grand). They've chosen to work in this field because they enjoy it and hope to find something of real clinical benefit to society. If their lucky they make a significant discovery that will translate into 1) an NIH grant that will fund them and perhaps ~10 people for 4-5 years and 2) a patent that, after the Universities and Biotech companies take their cut, amounts to a few percantage points.
BTW, NIH grants are extremely difficult to obtain and renew. You only get them if your productive and innovative. Additionally, the budgetary picture is very bleak given the Iraq fiasco.Unlike a CEO with a legion of talented techs most Ph.D's in academia are running and producing stuff on what amounts to a shoe string budget. Their writing grant's, all the time, managing their personnel, giving seminars, dealing with the bueracracy of the Federal guidelines and if that weren't enough teaching part or all of a semester, which in itself is a full time job. I'll be the first to say that the current system needs to be improved but until that happens this is what we have to work with. This guy is a perfect example of someone who ought to shut the hell up until they know what their talking about. 'nuff said
Polio vaccine, smallpox vaccine, and penicillin. Those three medicines together have saved millions of lives and virtually eliminated death and suffering from smallpox, polio, and various bacterial infections.
It's not like there's a lack of death and disease in the world, that the medical industry has to create artificial scarcity. I believe that's more up the electronic and IT companies' alley, actually (see: DRM).
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You have my sympathy. I hope medical science advances before the deer kicks its way out of your chest.
More seriously, another fact that is being overlooked is the relative maturity of the two fields. As you say, medicine is one of the oldest sciences (though it didn't really get on a scientific footing until quite recently- engineering and architecture were already old by the time we stopped looking for imaginary "humors"). Computer technology has made incredible progress in the last fifty years because- it didn't exist 60 years ago. The gains that are made in the early days of a science, particularly a science that benefits from a mature scientific establishment around it, are always going to be huge. Look at the difference that medicine made in the early days; the discovery of germ theory and various anti-pathogen compounds (antibiotics, anti-malarials, etc.) literally changed the settlement patterns and population scale of the world around us. Life expectancy in the developed world rose in a generation or so from "most of you will die as infants" to "most of you will live until some of your major organs wear out". We demolished many childhood diseases and put an end (though perhaps only temporarily) to the era of plague-driven population boom and bust cycles in urban environments.
So what's happened since then? We got into the hard stuff. Things like cancer, where the biological circuitry that drives your own cells turns against you- and it can happen in a million different ways. Antibiotic resistant diseases. Degenerative disorders that can progress for years without external signs. And we're continuing to make progress; more sophisticated transplants, gene therapy, implanted technologies, etc. But it's slow, because, frankly, we've reached a more complex plain of problems. We smashed all the easy ones pretty quickly.
Computers and electronics are still in the early phase. They benefited from the fact that a number of allied fields (electrodynamics, manufacturing, materials science) were already much more mature when they got their start. The question is, will they continue to grow apace once they hit the regime where there's a whole lot more to it than 'refine, repeat' in order to keep squeezing out those Moore's law boosts? We're already seeing some indications that the game may be changing; as chips sizes approach quantum mechanical limits, computer tech is going to move into a new problem regime where things are going to get much, much more complicated. I would be very surprised if at that point electronics doesn't move into a more settled, mature phase of development, and away from the rapid growth that marked the 20th century.
So how is Intel's record on repairing defective microprocessors? I don't mean designing out the problem, I mean repairing them once they are in the field.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Please mod parent up. This is precisely why this medical model does not work. It is not geared to rid people of illnesses - it is just a legal drug bandits' model! Now you see why considering regulating the medical industry is not that crazy...
The Force actually is with me.
In many ways he's comparing apples and oranges. The technology side of biology has moved rapidly in recent years in many fields. Think of how rapidly we've gone from sequencing a single plasmid getting you a PhD to sequencing becoming a service. Not to mention the improvements in quality and speed along the way.
Why can't I have a voice driven interface on my computer that only recognizes MY voice and works even when I shout at it from the other room? You semiconductor types have really let me down there....
"The United States also continues to spend far more on a per capita basis for healthcare than any other country. It spent over $4,600 per capita on healthcare in 2000 - more than twice the average of almost $2,000 across OECD countries. Public spending per capita in the U.S. is also high (it follows Iceland and Germany), even though only about one-quarter of the population is insured through public programmes"
OECD
Two people of exactly the same body mass and type will react differently to the same drug, and we usually don't know why.
He said:
But in pharma, if a clinical trial doesn't work--which means the average of all the patient responses is not better than the average of a placebo treatment--they just throw [the drug] away, when in fact the averages may hide stuff that did work, and something that made patients different [such as genetics]
I graduated from college as an electronic engineer, but I've been doing more and more software these days. My attitude has always been, if it doesn't work, I must find why. Use an oscilloscope, a logic analyzer, a debugger, *trace* the internal working of the system, find out what's wrong.
The gist of Grove's interview seems to be that in the pharma industry no one is interested in debugging a system that doesn't work, because it's more profitable to get another grant and start a new research.
While I agree with most of what Mr. Grove states in the article, I believe that he is missing a large portion of the picture.
There is an inherent desire in everyone to put the needs of "Self" before the needs of "The Greater Good", whether they like it or not. Instinctual self-preservation is one thing, but in this day and age where getting eaten by a bear is unlikely, the same thought processes carry over into the world of technology, finance, etc., etc.. I need money to survive in the society I am a part of. One that I, realistically, have no choice but to be a part of.
While I do not really see that as a problem(the necessity of money), I DO see a problem with making billions of dollars, fattening up ones own portfolio, then confining the benefits of that money to just one person. Does one really need billions of dollars to survive? I think not. It is this instinctual "Me first!" attitude that really holds Humanity back from Greatness. It is an attitude that permeates Mankind.
If you are so interested in the welfare of others, Mr. Grove, put your money where your mouth is. Break the mold and put all that excess wealth Intel has earned you into "Get 'er done!" research. Hell, make some money while your at it. Just get it done. You did it once with micro-processors, why not do it in the field of medicine?
I find it sadly odd that people like Mr. Grove become vocal about something like Parkinsons' disease only once it has impacted them directly.
Until individuals process "me" as "we", true, forward thinking progress will be gimped.
There are of course, comparable scenarios when you move to the cutting-edge of the IT industry - how long have we heard of quantum computing? 10 years ? In an industry that proceeds with just darting pace, I don't have a quantum computer on my desktop yet. Is it because the researchers are incompetent ? No. It's because the problems they are trying to solve are inherently hard.
How long does it take to invent new mathematics on which useful algorithms can be built ?
Besides , biology changes with time, context, and is inherently and mathematically a complex, if not chaotic system. Anyone who has visited the E-Cell project knows how hard it is to create a standard working model of a single minimum cell, let alone create models of organisms, colonies, ecologies, epidemiologies and disease states.
Silicon, though, does not change its behaviour based on context, the complexity in creating circuits does not by far approach that of living organisms. In one way, the IT industry has been surfing the semi-conductor break-through wave for some time...and we all know what Moore's law predicts. It's hard to say what will happen in the future, but barring economic factors, the current availability of technology is only a reflection of our level of understanding and the maturity of a science. It is NOT necessarily an indicator of the competence or lethargy of the scientists pursuing a particular field.
What Mr.CEO of Intel, does not know is how much biotechnology has changed the last century. How does he think his bread, wine, beer, antibiotics, industrial chemicals like acetone, textiles, (the list goes on) are produced. What of the eradication of small pox, near total eradication of poliomyelitis, MDR for tuberculosis, 80% survival rate for breast and prostate cancer ..and so on ?
These things didn't occur on their own. The community worked hard to solve these problems, even if partially.
Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Computers and electronics are still in the early phase. They benefited from the fact that a number of allied fields (electrodynamics, manufacturing, materials science) were already much more mature when they got their start. The question is, will they continue to grow apace once they hit the regime where there's a whole lot more to it than 'refine, repeat' in order to keep squeezing out those Moore's law boosts? We're already seeing some indications that the game may be changing; as chips sizes approach quantum mechanical limits, computer tech is going to move into a new problem regime where things are going to get much, much more complicated. I would be very surprised if at that point electronics doesn't move into a more settled, mature phase of development, and away from the rapid growth that marked the 20th century.
That's the 1 trillion question. I study nanotech, and that question definitely hits home. To tell you honestly, we're getting there. One nanometer is 10 angstrem, that is, about 10 average atom diameters. And the smallest MOSFET gate I know of is already 14 nm wide. You can't shave off many more atoms from that. There just isn't much to diffuse under such a gate, not many carriers to deplete, really, these MOSFETs are barely working. So, let's see, but I would say you're very close to be right.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I submit that you don't know what you are talking about.
Diabetes? - You probably have heard of insulin? People used to die of advanced diabetes. Now it is a manageable condition.
Cancer? What do you mean, "nope"?? One of the first things anyone learns is that "cancer" is not a single disease. The second thing is that the past thirty years have seen miraculous progress: any type of cancer used to be a death sentence. Nowadays, most types of non-solid tumors are eminently treatable, with very good prognosis. Fer chrissakes, they are now promoting vaccine against cervical cancer -- just watch some TV to catch an ad.
AIDS - in 20 years went from certain death to manageable condition (at least, in rich countries).
etc, etc, etc.
There is plenty wrong with big pharma and with medical reearch, but let's not make uneducated claims.
But I have a profoundly debilitating and poorly understood mental illness called schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. It's just like being schizophrenic and manic depressive at the same time. The symptoms including depression - sometimes suicidal depression - a profoundly euphoric state called mania, paranoia and other delusions, and visual and auditory hallucinations.
If you want to know what it's like to be paranoid, if you want to know what it's like to hallucinate, then I invite you to read my essay My Deepest Fear. It's about a shadowy and secret branch of law enforcement known as The Thought Police. They are so secret that they are visible only to the clinically insane - and to the regular beat cops who are now and then unwittingly pressed into the service of The Thought Police when it comes time for a fugitive from their lethal brand of justice - a fugitive such as myself - to turn himself in:
I explain in my piece that arrests by The Thought Police are better known as "officer-assisted suicides", and that at one time I was within days of turning myself in to them. It was only out of love for my wife that I sought legal advice from a special sort of attorney. These attorneys can't see The Thought Police themselves, but they are aware of their existence and can dispense valuable legal advice.
The first such attorney I saw was a psychiatrist in a hospital emergency room.
But all it takes is ten milligrams of Zyprexa to put any fears of The Thought Police out of my mind. While I'm still a fugitive from justice, Zyprexa enables me to pass as a law-abiding citizen.
Zyprexa works by manipulating the concentrations of various neurotransmitter chemicals in the neural synapses of my brain, notably dopamine. Excessive dopamine is the immediate cause of paranoia and hallucinations.
Antipsychotic drugs have been on the market for decades, but the older ones worked poorly and had debilitating side effects, such as the seizure I once experienced from Haldol. The "atypical" antipsychotics such as the Zyprexa I take, work much better.
The first such atypical antipsychotic, clozapine, was licensed only in the late '80's. The first one I took, Risperdal, was licensed in late '93. These drugs have enabled millions of schizophrenics and schizoaffectives to get out of the hospital, to get back t
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Some drugs alter a chemical balance.
Other drugs kill things.
Comparatively, it is much easier to alter a balance than it is to kill things, WITHOUT killing the patient.
For example, if you have a hormone deficiency, it's pretty 'easy' to replace the hormone you're missing.
But if your body is being killed by a living organism (bacteria/virus/cancer/etc), it is much harder to kill the bad thing WITHOUT killing the good thing.
That's why it's easy to create anti-depressants and things that make it easier to have an erection, but hard to create drugs that kill cancer but NOT the rest of you.
paintball
Perhaps you should study his biography before you flame him. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he did his own research and got what amounts to a respectable training in biology and medicine.
He's not mad because "it has turned out to be hard to find out how to stop people from getting sick and old". He's mad because he feels it would be rather simple to do more to help sick and old people, if only the experts in the medical profession would open up their minds a little and try to learn from other fields how to improve their research.
Grove obviously hasn't heard of Havard's Law of Biological Research....
"Any organism under the most carefully controlled conditions of temperature, pressure and other related variables will do what ever it damn well pleases."
As a scientist I can state categorically that it is not currently feasible to do the types of failure analysis that is common in electrical engineering. The most complicated machinery or circuitry ever constructed by humans is trivially simple when compared to the human body. We're slowing developing techniques that will allow for such failure analysis but this is a slow process.
And his idea of needing more non-conformists is fine provided he favors snake-oil salesmen. While the scientific community is a little slow to change, this is overall a good thing. Even the biggest changes, the most recent of which being the acceptance of prions, eventually occur and only take a 5-10 years (largely because only a few people were working on it and they needed to do a LOT of experiments).
If 2 guys in a garage can invent a cure for AIDS, then I would like to see that.
In the past, plenty of brilliant physicists, businessmen, etc. came into medical research thinking they can teach doctors a lesson. Their elegant theories held no water in the health science context, so they walked away embarrassed. Andy Grove can believe in his "herbal medicine cures" and take all the cheapshots he likes.
Here's a computer problem comparison since that is probably your specialty. There are a MILLION programs out there that can act as calculators, they're very easy programs to write - but there are only a handful of good BLAS libraries out there, those are difficult problems. You'd be called a fool if you suggested that we could make BLAS progress faster by taking the people off developing calculators and put them on BLAS - it's the same as your uneducated assumptions about the medical community.
Comparing high tech industry to the pharmaceutical industry is like comparing apples and oranges. They're entirely different, not only in their domains (machinery vs. life), but in philosophy. In high tech, eliminating the problem equals money. In pharma, eliminating the problem puts you out of business. Sure, researchers may want to cure prostate cancer and whatnot, but do you think that a company that can make $120 for one pill that suppresses symptoms wants to cure the underlying cause?
Once those has been exhausted, they perform surgery to remove the infected parts, and then start all over again.
That's the point though, and the problem. Unlike a new PC, medical companies cannot sell you a new "cure" for a disease that has already been cured. The can continue to sell something which alleviates the symptoms, or something that "might work," or "helps a bit" or something that induces a requirement for new additional medications (bonus points for not curing the original ailment).
There is a vested interest in not curing major conditions or diseases. In IT, the vested interest (profit-wise) is to crank out something that's cheap to produce, but better than last year's generation so people will buy new products.
You know, I found it odd that Andy Grove, a person who is so soundly embedded in an engineering field, would compare the research on materials and physical sciences with biology.
:-))
I think he can see the wave of his mortality now very clearly, rushing towards him and he faces it with unreasonable assumptions about the fields that deal with human medicine.
The human being is the single most unique organism in the universe. Nothing else created by the Universe can do what we do. (Knock on SETI wood....but I am pretty confident that is a fact. Prove me wrong.
We laugh, cry, know the time before and after our passing and feel things beyond that which can be measured such as compassion, love, hopelessness.
Unfortunately, more often than not that includes a great deal of selfishness and greed.
Personally, when I see the average person now days I say to myself: "Thank GOD he will only be around for 70 some years or so...."
Most of us are poor human beings. (I count myself in that because I want one of those new 45nm ThinkPAD laptops comming out.....but seriously. Most of my friends point out the fact I have an "unnatural" like of my "laptops". How dare they call my laptop a mere laptop! It my MISTRESS silly....FREAK!)
His comments about the pharm industry are right on of course. It is an industry built on greed. Half of the problem is that the industry only seeks a dollar.
Why in the hell would you invest any more money for example in a liver/cholesterol drug if it is already making you a 40% profit margin and you have the market locked up for 20 some years?
I certainly wouldn't, who CARES about a cure. I can draw a similair example to the energy sector in our country. Gas and Oil companies are making MASSIVE profits, why the hell would you build any more refining capability or search for alternative energy sources at $100 dollars a barrel?
Simply because it feels like August outside in October?
If you try you might even find yourself DEAD if you rock the boat. (I mean poor Sadam of course....maybe not so poor, but don't even THINK about selling oil in anything but US Dollars pal.)
My point is that the free enterprise system is driven by dollars, not by cures or any sort of humane creedo. It is the creedo of free enterprise. However, I do believe we COULD have a biotech sector that moved forward VERY fast like the electronics industry.
But the direction of the research cannot be focused strictly on patents and dollars like it is now.
Not everything is perfectly fitted to the idea of the free enterprise system you know.
For example, take the IIS. Yes, the International Space Station. It is almost done! Nice job and it wasn't a project based on a budget. Thats important. You simply cannot give up! The budget means nothing, it is completing the project which is important.
Given the same scale of things, Medical research needs to have the same sort of backing from the international community. I see it going something like this:
1) A Directorate is setup to request votes on the top 10 human diseases. People elect representitives to have a position on this board with their vote to eliminate a human disease say, Organ Transplants. I mean, if we can stop doing organ transplants and turning people into Frankestein chemical projects for the pharm industry, and actually GROW replacement organs. Who needs cures for organs? Just plug in a new one!
Great idea isn't it? Yeah, I like it too.
So everyone votes and my idea happens to win. (The project goal is to be able to regenerate any human tissue in the human body.) I would start with the heart. (I am the head of the directorate.....:-)
Now, the Directorate seeks funding, does advertising on TV.
"Are you getting old? Do you have Heart Disease? Wouldn't it be great if we could just grow you a new heart and you can dump those 17 pills a day you are taking to keep your ticker running?
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
But cars are just big dumb physics and a bit of chemistry, and we haven't made anywhere near the progress on them that we have with computers. My 1985 Toyota got 27 mpg when it was new. Except for a few hybrids, most of the cars on the market don't get more than 20% better mileage than that. Brakes have improved a lot, paint's a lot better, so cars last longer, and manufacturing costs have come down (though inflation hides how much cheaper cars are.) Pollution has gotten somewhat better. Cars might not need repairing quite as often.
Except maybe for paint and a few pollutants, and of course for how fancy the car stereo players are, we haven't seen anything like one order of magnitude improvement in price/performance of anything in the automobile space, compared to the ~4 orders of magnitude in CPU speeds or 6 in memory costs, or even the one order of magnitude improvement in the cost of a desktop machine that runs the popular bloatware. So give the medicine people a bit of slack.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
After cloning Dolly the sheep, Ian Wilmut was invited to Boston to give a lecture on his work. After his presentation, there was a call for questions and the room was silent. There was zero interest in this research and you'd have to quite naive to not know why. Everybody there was making their living on grants. The last thing in the world you want to put on a federal grant is that you're going to do human therapeutic cloning. So why would you even bother asking a question in the direction. The subject has nothing to do with you if you're an American biomedical researcher who plans to stay employed. And yet at the same time it's some of the most exciting science in decades.
That's fucked up. This is politics essentially censoring science.
Now, I've seen a lot of arguments in this thread about how medicine is so regulated and semiconductors aren't, but I think that's slightly disengenuous. In fact, Intel has broken the law many times in their chip making efforts. This is not a secret. They've been sued probably hundreds of times since the seventies for contaminating groundwater supplies with heavy metals and doing all kinds of mean nasty things that release toxic chemicals into the air, water and dumped across the land. That's just a fact and it shouldn't be surprsing to anyone here at Slashdot. I'm all into recycling and doing my part to save the planet and what not, but being fully aware of Intel's past I'm still using their products right now. I'm culpable as well. What's done is done. They bent the rules and went for it and they certainly had the nuts to go ahead and say fuck it to the rules sometimes even if it meant lawsuits. Intel has been sued for taking chances with peoples health on hundreds of occasions. It's not such a different situation. Let's not pretend they never took any risks and everything was just hunky dory and above board all the way down the line and somehow it's a whole different game for people in medicine.
Admittedly, there is a big time difference in the business models which helps explain the differences. Semiconductors are essentially a glorified form of printing that uses lots of nasty chemicals. So printing and money go hand in hand. Money is printed too, after all. Medicine is a whole other ball of tits. It is supposedly privatized and profit oriented in the US, but it doesn't really work that way on the research level as we see with this story about Ian Wilmut and the questions that weren't asked. Personally, I belive medicine should not and essentially can not be profit oriented in an effective way, certainly not a moral way. It should be government subsidized just like education and the government should be forward thinking and willing to take chances and innovate. The heart of the problem with that plan is that the American electorate seems to be so incredibly dysfunctional and hooked on this psychotic free market rhetoric that real advanced medical techniques based on stem cells, gene therapy and tailored therapies will probably emerge and become popular in the massive state subsidized medical systems of Asia and Europe first.
I think not. He should shut his face as he really has no clue what hes talking about.
Its pretty hard to compare advances in physics to advances in the bio-sciences.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The differences are vast between electronics and biomedical technology. We can create any system we want with a silicon motherboard with always expanding technology, whereas we're just now unlocking the code of the Human Genome. But with the science of the fields set aside, pharmaceutical companies make their money from people being sick. If you cure the illness, you destroy the money flow. There's profit to be had if people are sick. Whereas, failing hardware would get you nowhere but out of business.
It seems to me that the real difference between areas of research that have been exploding and areas that seem stagnant is how they are funded. If you pay for research, you tend to get research. If you pay for solutions, you tend to get solutions. And if you pay for research and at the same time make it nearly impossible to bring a new product to market, then you get a lot of research and very few new products. It's not rocket science.
It is an apples/oranges comparison, as someone else said. But the reason the comparison is invalid is that Intel (for instance) only gets paid after they ship product, and cancer research (for instance) gets paid whether they ship or not.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Electrons, logical gates, etc. are very simple objects when compared to living things, like cells, bacteria or related stuff like protein folding. Any classical object of physics is much simpler than any object of study of the life sciences. This is a problem. Life scientists know about it.
Besides, there's no such thing as "useless" research. The only reason HIV was so quickly identified for what it is was because of a bunch of "fringe" virologists that had been working for a very long time on this unknown type of virii called retrovirus no one gave a damn about. But boy, was everybody glad they were doing their thing when we needed them!
So, go back to silicon chips, will ya? Who cares if he's "fed up." You don't undertand this stuff. Wanna help? Try developing another approach than the same old, same old Van Neumann architecture. Otherwise, STFU, 'cause Intel's job is easy.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I agree with the sentiment expressed in many of the posts about this article, (that Andy Grove has been ignoring a lot of the very real developments that have occurred in the last few decades), but I do think he is right in that there are many aspects of the American biomedical research culture that are holding back advances significantly. One post specifically mentioned the fact that generally it is not considered OK to die during a study of a possible cure for something that is fatal anyway. This makes no sense to me. If I was in a situation where I had a few months to live, and this was more or less a certainty, I would be pissed if legal ramifications prevented me from participating in what might be a very enlightening study even if it had little chance of curing me and risked killing me. I would simply rather die a little bit sooner having given the world valuable data than die a little bit later without causing any additional benefit. As I understand it, this kind of thing happens frequently due to researchers' justifiable reluctance to risk getting sued. I also believe, as a consumer of a few different prescription pharmaceuticals, that drug companies are deliberately not releasing potentially useful formulations because they are afraid that doing so would erode their existing drug businesses. (Think about "extended release" formulations of just about any drug currently on the market -- if there isn't one yet, it is because the patent on the original hasn't expired yet. Once the patent expires, expect that the "extended release" version will be coming out shortly, having already been tested and approved, accompanied by a massive advertising campaign that tries to tell everyone, doctors included, why the old version sucks. The fact that our government encourages this behavior is appalling. It makes voting for anything a bittersweet experience.
They make money, thats why. At minimal risk of litigation.
Not that I agree with that, I myself would LOVE better neuro/psychiatric/physiological medications for myself and my family. The sad truth of the matter is given the industry environment it is more profitable for said pharmaceutical company to manufacture drugs with lower risk:net profit ratios than those with a
1)smaller user base;
2)more difficult research;
3)increased chance of litigation.
Given the current business/political environment, this is the reality of Big Pharma.
sig sig sig siggy sig
System biology is hard. Damn hard. System biology is harder than math or physics. Fact.
And for a field so new, it's amazing what we're building in terms of theories.
And from a theoretical POV, Intel's computers sure aren't the shit. In a parallel world, Lisp Machines-type of computers would've been better.
Now kill me. I've said it.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
When your research subject is well organized sand.
Besides which, processors are designed to be as simple as possible, follow rules as closely as possible and be as organized as possible. Organic systems are not. The simplest organic structure makes the most complicated processor look like a kindergarten level puzzle game. Then when you consider that very few organic structures can be dealt with in isolation....
We don't understand the human body.(We don't understand computers) We don't know how some drugs even work. (We don't know how some applications even work) It isn't like a computer that we built from scratch ourselves. (umm... sex? I know you are a nerd, but you do know how sex works, right? End result = baby) Two people (computers) of exactly the same body mass (CPU) and type (OS) will react differently to the same drug (application), and we usually don't know why. We haven't mapped the genome(read the source to Windows), and when we finish mapping it(reading it), we won't understand it. We don't know why aging(bugginess) happens. We don't know what causes many diseases(bugs). We don't know where (computer) viruses came from(answer to both: China) or how to stop them(anti-virus/Antibiotic).
Medical(computer) science is mostly things we don't know, so we stick to the few we do and research the heck out of them. Also, Big Pharma(computer techs) aren't interested in cures(fixes). Cures(fixes) hurt profits. They research treatments(service packs), not cures(fixes). That's what I'd hope is the main point of a rant against Big Pharma(tech support). They are paid to keep people(computers) sick(buggy), but mask the symptoms(create work-arounds), not to actually make them well(stable).
I think that most medical historians would place Louis Pasteur's work confirming the germ theory of disease in the 1860's, and his later work on vaccines, as some of the major early foundations of modern medicine. The germ theory of disease led to the idea of sterilization of tools and surfaces during surgical operations, greatly increasing their survivability for patients. Pasteur's work on vaccines also is pioneering work in immunology.
:-)
In contrast, Penicillin was almost a lucky observation that would never have taken place if people hadn't been investigating bacterial growth as a follow-up on Pasteur's pioneering work. In fact, anti-bacterial sulfa drugs developed by Bayer were in use prior to penicillin, but were more likely to cause allergic reactions than penicillin was. Penicillin's major advantage was fewer side effects, which allowed it to be used more indiscriminately during WWII battlefield surgery.
Of course Pasteur was French (i.e. non-American) and a chemist. Could that explain why you don't seem to remember about him?
So, do tell me -- what are these drugs that "treat symptoms rather than cure a disease"? To which medications and which diseases do you refer?
I've heard this old canard SO many times, but I've never heard anyone tell me these drugs that the evil "Pharms" are pushing, or the diseases for which they're withholding cures.
Sounds like those old conspiracy theories of the automobiles that get 400 miles to the gallon that the oil companies are preventing the populace from finding out about, or the nylon that doesn't tear, or the razor blades that don't dull, etc... Call snopes.com, someone!
Medical science is "held back" by ethics. A dead human isn't the same thing as a bad chip fab.
Gleevec
...speed the cure for Parkinson's Disease and thus help him live longer. However, his critique is a bit off. It is more like the difference between the FCC and FDA.
Diabetes? Used to be a painful, horrible, death sentence. Even twenty years ago you could expect to start having limbs amputated and go blind after about 20 years. Today? Somewhat reduced life expectancy, pretty much normal quality of life.
Cancer? Most cancers have seen a dramatic increase in survivability. Again, cancer used to be death sentence. Today many cancers have a reasonably high cure rate.
Arthritis? Drugs, collagen injections and joint replacement have made severe arthritis MUCH less of an impact on quality of life then it used to be.
Osteoperosis? New drugs are a lot better then old ones (or nothing). Here prevention is key. We know a lot more now about what causes osteoperosis, who's at particular risk, and how to monitor the development of the disease.
MS? New drugs are way better at controlling the disease then old ones. Not that long ago we didn't have any idea what MS was, we could only observe it's effects. Today we're starting to learn more about what MS is, what causes it, and how to prevent it. New drugs (including one that's practically free) are being discovered that are much better.
You have to remember that microprocessors are engineering. All the fundamental processes are well understood. Medicine is just starting to glimpse in the distance the possibility of being able to ENGINEER drugs and other treatments instead of more or less randomly trying things we find lying about on the ground to cure things we can do little more than name.
I remember hearing a med student talk about the speed of progress in medicine. He mentioned that if they were allowed to experiment on humans directly, they would cure most of the common diseases within 10 years. Eventually we will be able to get comparable results from in-silco simulations without the severe consequences.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
Minoxidil was a heart medication. Growing hair on bald spots was a side effect that the pharmas did the trials on so they could sell it as a baldness cure.
Viagra... blood pressure medication. Boners were a side effect.
A number of the medications you rail against as fluff were actually discovered while trying to fight something more important. They turned out to be better at the fluff than the intended purpose, but fluff makes money too, and gears were switched so they got marketed for the side effect instead of the intended effect..
Start a happiness pandemic
Crohn's Cure:
.I've lost 7" around my stomach and 10 kgs in weight. 2. My complexion has improved (no more flaky skin). 3. My sleep pattern has improved. I sleep the whole night through now. 4. I have increased energy and mental focus. I hope this testimonial encourages anybody who reads it.
http://drsears.com/ArticlePreview/tabid/399/itemid/9865/Default.aspx
"The most miraculous aspect of the Zone for me has been the disappearance of my Crohn's disease. By 1998, I was able to stop all my medications for Crohn's disease. By 1999, I was no longer in daily pain. By 2000, every medical test determined that my intestines were in great health."
http://drsears.com/ArticlePreview/tabid/399/itemid/9849/Default.aspx
What made the most sense to me is The Zone Diet is balanced. I had nothing to lose so I thought I would give it a go. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I have made in my life. Not only has the Zone Diet been instrumental in getting my Crohn's Disease under control but it has benefited me in other ways as follows: 1
http://drsears.com/ArticlePreview/tabid/399/itemid/9266/Default.aspx
Q: Dear Dr. Sears,
I have inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn's) and must take 2400 mg of Asacol (melamine) a day to maintain remission. It's an anti-inflammatory that works in the colon. Are you aware of any actions of this medication that would affect my hormonal balance, Zone-wise? If so, do you have any suggestions for adjusting my Zone diet to compensate? (Note that inflammatory bowel disease is an organic disorder--thought to be an autoimmune condition--unlike its functional cousin, irritable bowel syndrome, with which it's sometimes confused.)
Thanks,
Lectoria
A: Dear Lectoria:
It has been demonstrated that Crohn's disease can be highly modified by high-dose fish oil. This is also true of other autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and lupus. I would suggest increasing your intake of pharmaceutical-grade fish oil to about 5 grams per day of long-chain Omega-3 fatty acids, and you should be able to reduce the amount of Asacol to keep the condition under control.
-------------------
Read through the testimonials on drsears.com and zoneliving.com.
my own testimonial is pretty amazing, too. Lost 23 lbs of fat while simultaneously gaining about 4 lbs of muscle (all in 5 months time). i've lost 4 lbs off my waist. my energy level is through the roof, i feel much better, my resting pulse rate has dropped 17 beats per minute. i'm 41 and i'm looking at what is very nearly a six pack - something i could not get in my youth despite trying very hard to get it. i'm 5'10" and my low daily weight is less than 160 lbs - not bad for a 40 something.
my lifelong allergy problem has disappeared since i started taking fish oil.
the zone + ultra refined fish oil is an anti-inflammation diet. allergies are the result of inflammation. my allergies are gone, gone, gone. crohn's is also an inflammatory condition. i believe the zone + fish oil will calm, if not eliminate, the problem.
a friend got on the zone and his 2 year battle with acid reflux 100% disappeared over night.
give it a shot. once you learn how to implement this balanced, rational diet, it is pretty easy to follow. you can always cheat, but you likely won't want to given the excellent results of staying on the diet.
not many will listen, but not many 40 somethings end their life long allergies and see what is very nearly a six pack in the mirror. it will be a ripped six pack in a few more months, too.
i'd wish you good luck, but luck isn't needed. you need to take stand and make the right choice. i hope you do.
Medicine makes money by treating, NOT curing.
Technology (especially chips) make money when you upgrade to the next model.
"I'd say that the medical industry has been feeding on the community for way too long. Medical procedures are insanely expensive and the equipment and medicine costs are through the roof.
If malpractice suits were not possible, and if the insanely expensive last-ditch heroics to delay death were banned, medical expenses would be a lot lower. But, with lawyers filing suit whenever a medical outcome is less than perfect, and people insisting that doctors do everything possible to keep a dying person "alive" ... it's going to be expensive.
Two real examples: 1 - An 85-year old man was brought in after a massive stroke: his children refused to accept the inevitable and as a result, we had him in ICU for about a week on life support before his brain finally gave up. 2 - An acquaintance wanted a "better" childbirth experience, so she use dhome birth and a midwife. Things went wrong - badly wrong - and the midwife did the right thing and called an ambulance. The acquaintance was quickly transported to the county hospital and her baby was delivered by c-sectoin. She sued the midwife and tried to sue the hospital because of the "mental anguish" of ending up unexpectedly in a maternity ward at County (ewwww, low-class patients!).
I would love to see a independent report on the percentage of health care money that goes to lawsuits, suit prevention, and liability insurance.
Think Deeply.
As a person who doesn't suffer from hardware issues related to this I'll have to disagree entirely. It isn't the hardware, it's the money and incentive to work on basic research.
The problems facing medicine are orders of magnitude more complex than anything else in the world.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
One cause of Crohn's disease is an insufficient amount of good bacteria. To resolve the problem, add as much good bacteria to the diet as you can and eat foods which support good bacteria.
Foods which contain good bacteria are yogurt, home made kraut, and home made kefir.
Ingredients which support good bacteria are dandelion leaves, Jerusalem artichokes, chicory, bananas, garlic, onions and leeks, mentioned at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/humanbody/truthaboutfood/healthy/prebiotics2.shtml
A prepared food which supports good bacteria is broth, mentioned at:
http://www.townsendletter.com/FebMarch2005/broth0205.htm
As a biochemist that *does* have to deal with hardware issues I'll have to disagree entirely. It isn't the money or incentive, it's the hardware. Most drugs todday are designed uning brute-force computational methods with experiments following after. If we had the access to better hardware, we could better model interestions between drugs and proteins and enzymes. The better we are at designing and predicting structures, the less we need to spend on very costly experiments.
The other part of the treatment for Chrohn's disease is to stop feeding bad bacteria, as explained at:
http://www.healingcrow.com/dietsmain/crohn/crohn.html
The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) mentioned in that explanation, is at:
http://www.healingcrow.com/dietsmain/scd/scd.html
While there is obviously competition between drug companies, any other form of medicine, while arguably not technically illegal, finds it near impossible to get government approval or any funding. Chinese medicine and natural herbal medicine has been around for millennia, but it is not officially accepted here in the states. Worse, the medical establishment has brainwashed the population into thinking all other forms of medicine is fraudulent or useless. I have been trying for 7 years to get funding for my herbal cure for Alzheimer's, but not even my mother will believe me. The government spends billions for Alzheimer's research but does not even investigate my product except to tell me not to sell it. See http://www.grazoph.com/.
Calculating the most stable structure and interactions between proteins is very computationally intensive.
It's hard to imagine how each cell figures out how to function without supercomputers. Thank goodness computers were invented so we could invent medicine!
Watson and Crick didn't need a supercomputer to do good science. Nor do you.
Medicine/Research/Pharma has become more of a free market system rather than a science. It's shifted towards profit and cash flow. Finding cures or encouraging prevention isn't profitable. Grove wants a cure, but even if they did come up with something new for Parkinson's it would probably only treat the symptoms.
When Larry King recently had a second interview about autism, the push was for "detection" and "treatment", perpetually profit drive activities. Barley was "cause", "cure" or "prevention" even mentioned.
Guess which is the crappy industry?
;).
The one where if you are number 2 (AMD), you lose billions of dollars a year even though you:
1) produce decent products with near top of the line technology
2) price them reasonably
3) Keep improving them every year
4) Keep reinvesting _billions_ of money to keep yourself competitive
(It's similar in the memory industry and other tech industries as well).
I'm sure the "stupid" people in the medical industry are going to take his advice. Yeah, right.
And the people in the furniture industry who make crap chairs for high prices and "help" give millions back problems will actually start making comfortable chairs for reasonable prices that don't fall apart after less than 3 years. It's amazing how people are still making crappy chairs after thousands of years. Whereas there's hardly any market for 5MB hard drives anymore except maybe in some weird niche or for collectors.
The medical industry stuff isn't that easy, so I'll cut them a bit of slack (a bit only though, they still could be doing a lot better than they are now). But the furniture industry has a lot to answer for.
Anyway I think the IT industry has become the "glamor" industry for a lot of resources to be chucked at - brains, money etc.
In the 1950s-1970s it probably was aerospace, resulting in major advances like the first airliner, jumbo jet, concorde, mission to mars, space station, apollo etc. In comparison now we're just barely managing to stop the space shuttle from blowing up, and we're just talking about redoing the same old things all over again (Mars, Moon, space station, *yawn*).
That said the IT industry isn't doing that great either. We still haven't got AI after so many years of _crappy_ "research", we've spent a fair bit of time reimplementing UNIX, lots of code is still in crappy C. Douglas Engelbart must be very disappointed with the "advances" the IT software industry has made.
And where are those nuclear fusion power plants?
"You're all slackers!" he said, as he posted on slashdot
I echo the sentiments of the sibling/parent posters. To sum up:
..."
... and they sort of forgot about making any drugs. Instead, they made money through tactics with which any Slashdotter will be disgustingly familiar.
We have had steady advances in medicine. Just during the time I was in medical school (a decade ago), I was astounded by how much medical science had advanced. By the time I was finishing up on my medical training and getting ready for independent practice, we were being taught: "Remember that treatment for arthritis you learned in second year? Well, we don't do that any more --here's what we do instead
However, from the standpoint of the ordinary patient, there has been a problem in one specific area of medical research: Big Pharma. (That's what they call the largest pharmaceutical industries: Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, GSK, Astra-Zeneca, Wyeth, etc.) This is because they are not bringing new drugs to market.
Don't misunderstand me, now. I didn't say that basic research wasn't taking place, or that it didn't have potential to be developed into useful products. I said that Big Pharma was not bringing new drugs to market. I blame this on the profit-centred, corporate-minded groupthink that has been running Big Pharma. In a nutshell, Big Pharma has been mismanaged.
In the pharmaceutical industry, you can see a new drug coming from a long way off. First there has to be basic research; one in ten research studies will show a promising molecule (ie. possible drug candidate). One in ten molecules will be developed into a stable usable form that doesn't have to be sealed in gaseous form or injected directly into the kidney or other impractical things. One in ten usable molecules will show promise when tested on animals. One in ten animal-tested drugs will go on to clinical trials in humans. One in ten human trials will show something that's worthwhile marketing. (Okay, don't take the one-in-ten ratio too literally; a better estimate is that every drug brought to market came from somewhere around 500 to 1000 possible molecules.)
It takes time to go through all these discovery phases, and to go through clinical trials, get approval from the FDA (or equivalent regional drug authority), etc. There's a very long pipeline to go through before a drug gets to market, so you can see right now what sorts of drugs will be coming out five years down the road.
And Big Pharma has, basically, nothing coming out.
This is because there has been a huge merging frenzy in the past decade, almost like an orgy of nested expressions that would do any LisP programmer proud. Toss in SmithKline and Beecham, blend with Burroughs and Wellcome, sprinkle in some Glaxo, bake at high temperature, and out comes a steaming hot GlaxoSmithKline. Then there's Pfizer, gobbling up Warner and Pharmacia / Upjohn, and then spitting out the bones, a process so repetitious that the people eaten up and summarily laid off produced a T-shirt with the oval blue logo in the style of the Pfizer logo that says, "Pfired!"
It's been great for people juggling stocks. Valuations went up, people made money, CEO's made speeches
Any of you heard of "patent lawsuits"?
Yup, they went through patents! Hey, little company there, you can't sell our drugs, cuz WE have the patents! We have to make our money! My favourite example: a few years ago, a little company called Andrax sees that the patent for omeprazole (brand name Losec, or Prilosec in the USA) will be expiring soon, so they start developing a generic equivalent, preparing studies for the FDA to show that their generic equivalent is safe and equal to the brand name version. The plan is that, a year later, all the manufacturing equipment and research will be in place and they can start mass producing omeprazole the instant it comes off patent.
What happens? AstraZeneca ("AZ"), owner of the original brand name, sues Andrax for violating the patent. They say that the patent actually
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
The current average age expectancy in western and central Europe is 70 for men and 74 for women.
The average (men & women combined) life expectancy for Americans is 77.6 years, a record high.
In Australia a boy born in 2005 was expected to live to 78.5 years, on average, while a girl would be expected to live to 83.3 years.
Hell, Australia was matching Europe's current numbers way back in the early 80s, before unleaded petrol and when everyone smoked.
The end measure of a health care system is how long you live.
The US wins. Au comes in a close second.
Finally! Because, as we all know, the body is as well understood, and as simple as a circuit board. It's about time someone told all those pharmaceutical corporations to stop slacking off!
Are you saying that cars from BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, etc could be more fuel efficient by 80%? If so, then why aren't they doing it? They don't have the excuse of being "Americans".
At least the Japanese are pumping out hybrid electric vehicles...
The working definition of a cure for cancer - diabetes - congestive heart disease - is to see your patients still very much alive, active and alert, five years after the diagnosis, ten years after the diagnosis.
In this sense, there is a great deal of money to be made in cures.
Viagra was developed to combat hypertension and certain types of heart problems, which are serious diseases in need of new medicines. During the clinical trial it was noticed it had no effect in its intended indication, BUT seemed to cause erections. More studies and development and the drug was launched as Viagra.
Companies also often have several indications in mind for a particular chemical entity, but you can only progress the trials for the indications one at a time.
Many think his analogy of medicine to tech products inept. I say, run with it, but consider the consequences in the same light. Microsoft got blasted for taking so long to develop Vista, and still took criticism that there were compatibility issues with it and some hardware configurations (yeah, computer systems vary a lot, kinda like people). How long do you think it would've taken Microsoft to release Vista if a driver incompatibility resulted in a user's death? There could be thousands, maybe tens of thousands, dead already, the product would've been withdrawn, people put back on XP (the standard of care, which is unfortunate given the security issues, er., side effects), and Microsoft sued for billions in losses by individual and class action lawsuits, and subjected to a full FDA review. The magnitude of a mistake, the number of different diseases needing addressing, and tradeoff's in what's studied given the severity of disease, how common it is, how much improvement could be gained (to be honest people, a lot of pharmas are stopping work on new anti-depressants because the ones out there are about as good as it's going to get in the near term and it's too hard to create a differentiated antidepressant at this point), means some things don't get as much attention as others.
A good part of the answer lies in better partnering between pharma and academia. . .the two aren't rivals. Making a drug is hard enough that pharmas can't invent heavily in defining the etiology of diseases, though they do some. Academics are VERY well suited to that pursuit. HOwever, the perception that Pharmas are failing is driving more academics into the pursuit of their own drug design programs, that are failing miserably in terms of creating drugs you could actually ever hope to put into people. Cooperation and encouraging academics to work on more applicable value driven problems would be a good step towards finding more treatments.
We don't understand computers
We built them. Are you daft?
umm... sex?
You're willfully ignoring the obvious difference between building a computer and making a child through intercourse -- in the latter, you aren't directly wiring the central circuitry or designing the systems. Just because you can grow it doesn't mean you have to know why it grows, or how it works.
I know you are a nerd
This is the only part you got right, really -- it's obvious that you aren't a nerd. Why don't you go chase a football and drool on your shirt some more.
"Sez you. Still gets less than 10 mpg, you can't ever really use its speed without risk of getting caught, so you have an expensive, fuel quaffing car that looks pretty."
yeah Sez me. There are a lot of places to take your vehicles and drive fast...some are even legal.
If I'm on the 80 and it's a clear day, no cars form horizon to horizon, I'm doing 3 digits. I'll take the ticket if it comes to it. Yes, I have driven that route at 120+ for HOURS.
Barring that, there are a lot of race tracks.
Of course, I'd take the 550HP corvette, faster of the line, handles better in the curved gets better gas mileage. Not really a concern when driving a high performance vehicles, really.
Yeah, Harley don't out performs anything else out there, nor are the comfortable to drive, IMO.
Again, sports cars ARE cool, and always will be. Practical? no. Fuel efficient? no.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The hardware has been improving at a rate of a factor of 2 ever 18 months to two years for decades. It's not the bottleneck. My take is the algorithms are. We might be stuck with current methods for protein modeling, but they aren't that old. My bet is that there's still room for improvement in these algorithms.
Aubre De Gray (www.mprize.org) is trying to get the old-stuffy-gerentology establishment and the medical establishment to support the mprize by setting up a prize fund for those researchers that can demonstrate slowing/stopping/reversing aging in mice, then humans in the next 10 years. It would require the interdiscenairy efforts of a lot of people (anybody can donate to the mprize), with the exponential growth of computers, nanotech, biotech and the fact that computer tech drives these advances (modeling) etc. We would probasblly need 100 million to 1 billion to fund this project, heck, the US spends over 3 billion/month jsut on the Iraq war!!
your average billionare could probablly fund a program themselves (you know how cheap billionaires can get, they didn't get rich wasting money!). The world is really changing, with open source tools like MIT's biobricks and the soon to be released nanotech design tool nanoengineer1, who knows, perhaps that nerdy kid down the block may be designing the next nanobot that fixes our aging cells and makes everybody young again!!
for the first time in human history, we begin to understand how our body works. for the first time, we begin to understand the building blocks of biological system. be patient, we will see significant breakthrough in our lifetime! AIDS is begin to be under control, cancer patients are living longer... with the help of computers, we begin to do a better job collecting, storing and processing the data medical research are generating. call me optimistic, i see a bright future of medical revolution in the horizon.
This, I feel, is exactly why medical research - and research in general - shouldn't be privately funded.
A private company's main interest is to make money; nothing surprising there, that is what they are all about. So they will research the things that allow them to make the most money, which is not always what the world needs. Hence you can bet that there is a lot of research into fighting chronic diseases, which typically can't really be cured, but which can be made less troublesome, or cancer, which is still in many ways an uncurable disease; you can make the tumours go away, but the body produces new cancer cells all the time - it's just that in most cases our immune system handles it. And the medicine is hugely expensive - not necessarily justifiably so, but then there is the psychological side of it: everybody is terrified of cancer, so most people find it reasonable even to pay >$100K a year for treatment per patient.
Meanwhile there is a huge array of diseases that have been underfunded and understudied, simply because there is no money in them. Malaria, for example - it could probably be cured, but the patients are mostly poor people in Africa, and to make matters worse, once they are cured, they won't need the medicine again. On top of that, it is quite likely that an effective medicine would not be hugely expensive. Compare with penicillin - it's very cheap and easy to produce. Antibiotics are in general fairly cheap and you tend to lose your income base, because the patients get cured of their infections. Too little profit there; and as a result we now have the panic over the superbugs - it could easily have been avoided.
I'm not saying there should be no private medical research, but there should be much more public research - perhaps an order of magnitude more. This would be able to target the big, debilitating diseases that are ignored at the moment, and it would give the private companies some real competition to think about, to the benefit of all - well, possibly not the shareholders in the medical industry, but they don't seem to be starving, really.
See that article: Are Cancer Cures Being Hidden From the Public?.
/Z
and I think too many people confuse what is available there with progress and offerings being created by "Big Pharma" corporations.
I am VERY VERY HAPPY with the state of medical research from private companies we have in the states. Just in my short forty years on this world I can see a significant increase in my chances to survive ailments and injuries that would have doomed me before.
I think old Mr. Intel is just jumping on a PC bandwagon which will only lead us to socialized medicine and lack of progress. How can we attack an industry which is doing so much good? The burden of lawsuits is what slows acceptance. We no longer as a people accept the fact we are different even in the face of complex chemical compounds. Its downright dangerous to release new drugs because SOMEONE is going to react badly.
No, I am more than happy. My mother was diagnosed with diabetes thirty years ago and the steady progress made in that field alone has allowed her to live a normal and happy life without all the scary side effects people used to have (loss of vision, limbs, etc). Hell the drugs they have today have saved her from near death where before none of this was readily available.
Could the industry do more? Sure, but GET GOVERNMENT OFF ITS BACK. Just like the damn laws that raise private insurance to high levels - the federal government holds back this industry a lot - through laws that prevent insuring across state lines to suit happy federal courts that lawyers can cherry pick as there is no federal protection for companies who release drugs the feds declare safe.
We are entering a period where many drugs will be gene driven, even customized for the individual, and that is going to require a lot of cooperation between government and corporation, something that isn't there as government seems at times inherently hostile to corporations, especially those health care related
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
OK, Mr. Andras Grof, who fled communist Hungary for the USA to co-found Intel is now publicly attacking medical research for making such little progress compared to chip fabrication technology and the IT sector in general?
Then let me ask this: If IT is so super, why there are almost 500.000 different kinds of viruses, worms and other computer infestations? [Recent figure from Mikko H. Hypponen, chief researcher at finnish F-Secure Corp.]. Why are so many users plagued by spam, hacks and DDoS day after day? In comparison there just a few thousand different human illnesses, infections and most are curable or at least treatable. Many big epidemics were eradicated by the UN's WHO.
The fact that IT health is so miserable compared to human health directly stems from the basic fact that stupid software is running on stupid hardware. Therefore I shall say Mr. Groove please get off the pharmaceutical companies and in general I feel justified in telling the whole IT industry: "Doctor, cure yourself!"
The human body is several million times more complex than any processor made by Intel and mistakes can prove disastrous - just consider the scandalous cytokine storm mishap in a recent british pill test which almost killed seven people. Actually faulty computer systems have also killed human patients, e.g. the famous radiation therapy bug in DEC PDP-11. Progress must always be secondary to safety!
We should also remember the time when Bill Gates attacked car manufacturers for lack of automotive progress compared to computer
software advances. The answer given by General Motors' president makes people laugh to this day: "Yeah, your super Microsoft car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut it down, restart it and reopen the windows before you could continue."
I think Andy Groove's attack may results in exactly the same kind of satirical response.
Regards: Tamas Feher from Hungary.
breakthrough that I'd like to try out. Come over to my lab and we'll get you started.
Seriously, his comments are insulting to scientists around the world.
The medical industry has no reason to invent any cure for anything. There is no profit in curing. All they want is something that can aleviate the symptoms as long as possible. It is much more profitabe to sell cold medicine than to cure it. We're talking about billions every year here.
There will not be a cure for anything until researchers are affected.
Raise your hand if this reminds you at all of that old Bill Gates/Car Industry joke.
The reason the medical field is "lagging" is a very simple one: acceptable losses.
Here's what I mean: I used to work at a local computer store. We were good (people came from neighboring counties and even states) but we weren't cheap either. I often wound up having to make phone calls that basically went like this:
Me: "Mr. Smith, this is Steve and I've been working on your computer for a while. It turns out that you had some pretty bad spyware that's trashed your TCP/IP stack. That's why you can't get on the Internet. Now, I can do the long, arduous repair that will take the better part of the rest of the day and maybe into tomorrow and cost you almost $300 or I can do a Windows reinstall that will take an hour and cost about $90. Which would you like?"
Mr. Smith: "I'll take the reinstall, please." And of course he would. That gets his computer back to working order and saves a lot of money. Sure, his hard drive gets wiped but at least it's working again. We could probably even back up his important stuff.
Now, a medical analogy:
Doctor: "Mr. Smith, I'm afraid that you've suffered major injuries in that car accident. There's two things we can do: you could be in physical therapy for four or five years. It's painful and very expensive, even with your insurance. However you'll have a 98% chance of walking and living normally afterward. Otherwise you can skip the therapy, live the rest of your life in a wheelchair and be on pain medication. It's much cheaper but you'll never walk again."
Mr. Smith: "When can I start therapy?"
Now, it kind of seems like the difference I'm pointing out is the money, but that's not it. The difference is the acceptable loss. It's mostly acceptable, in the grand scheme of things, to lose all or most of the data on your computer. It's not acceptable to lose the use of your lower body. This brings me to my main point: computer science has to be good enough, medical science has to be perfect. The acceptable margin of error is orders of magnitude smaller when we're talking about people's lives. It takes much more time to fix a problem under those circumstances. If it was possible to reinstall a person's mind or yank out a malfunctioning kidney and replace it with nVidia's latest offering medical science would be much more "ahead". Unfortunately our bodies weren't built with simple upgrades in mind.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Neitzsche
Thas because the Moore Lay does not apply to medicien, we should invent the new Zhivago Law, well the science discoveryes double every 100 years :D
Screw drugs when you can just use Nano Bots.
Really good comment, probably the best informed one I've seen on slashdot in ages :). You're dead-on correct about repackaged drugs extending patent life.
However, talking about M&A activity your argument breaks down a bit. The pharma ecology consists of a number of different players.
Big Pharma: These guys get the most attention. They have deep pockets, big sales and marketing organizations, strong distribution and manufacturing channels. They need to sell big blockbuster drugs (drugs that have huge markets like Lipitor) to justify their stock price.
Midsized Pharma: These companies are like mini versions of the big guys. They aren't as big, but do NOT need big markets to survive. They just need some good, moderate successes in niche markets.
Startups: These companies specialize in research. They outsource whatever they can, and have no manufacturing, sales or marketing. Mostly, they do research and hope to get bought out.
Academia: Big colleges and universities. They are good at research but have no ability at manufacturing, sales or marketing. They're notoriously bad at estimating the value of what they have. Many professors simply found their own startups when they think they might have something.
OK so everybody does research, but startups and academia are better at it than the big pharmas. Basically, you want a situation where the big pharmas are selling the blockbusters like Viagra or Lipitor because they can handle the capacity. You want midsized pharmas to be selling everything else because they aren't chained to the expectation that every drug needs to be a mega-hit.
So typically you see new molecules being packaged and sold to startups to explore. There are small startups that buy drug concepts from big pharmas, then run them through the approvals process. Midsized companies both buy AND sell their drug proposals. Academia has no ability to get stuff approved, so they just sell their compounds or spin them off. Big pharma used to shelve drugs that they didn't think would be big winners, but now they simply sell them to other companies that can exploit them. Everyone wins.
Once the drug is nearly approved, big and midsized pharma buys them. They pay a heavy premium, which recoups the investor's time and the risk that the drug wouldn't be approved at all. Usually, since a startup has one or two drugs in its portfolio, the pharma doesn't dick around-- they just buy the whole company. Eventually the officers leave and found new startups.
Sometimes a big pharma has a "gap" in its pipeline-- they're big moneymakers are going out of patent while the drugs they thought would be about to be released fail their clinical trial. In that situation, if they have the money they'll buy another pharma to pick up its drugs, or, if they lack cash, they get snapped up by a pharma looking to expand. Hence all the mergers and acquisitions.
Research flows downhill to smaller companies, products bubble up to the pharmas. Products that are marginal improvements, like extended release versions, are a problem but if they really weren't that much better then managed care companies and doctors would stick with the now-generic version of the original drug.
Why do drugs take so long to develop? Answer: it takes 8-10 years to get them through clinical trials. It's illegal to sell a drug without doing that, but even if you did you'd end up with flipper babies eventually. Making sure something is safe is expensive and time consuming.
Why do drugs cost so much? Answer: it costs $800 million dollars to develop a new drug. That drug can sell for 5 years or so before going out of patent.
Why do pharmas make such big profits? Answer: risk premium and time value of money. These hotshot biotech startups go bankrupt all the time. The ones that make it have to return enough to make investing in them in the first place worth it.
Why do I think that the big pharmas will do pretty well? Because they're buying
as someone who works in hardware design, I had to say this statement is a joke. I design something, test it in the lab, and if it doesn't work-- oh well. No one gets hurt, and I wasted a couple of days. Clinical trials take eons by comparison. Design a machine/device, test it in a simulator, test it on animals, test it on people, and then possibly you can prove it works. Takes years compared to designing a testing a simple circuit. If Intel had followed have of the procedures necessary in medicine, bugs like the Pentium FP one would never had shown up. They would still be testing the 8086.
You saying we are tuned for eating fish.....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Actually that's a very good example you've given. For a lot of those, the diseases aren't *cured*, they are prevented via vaccination. That's great for future generations, and in many ways better than a cure, but it still sucks for those that are already afflicted.
The nice thing about vaccines to the medical companies? Well, they can sell those to future generations for a long time into the future, without need for further development (unless, oops, they do something like use mercury as a preservative). This is still good money, and likely a fair bit more than a cure. A good vaccine can be sold for decades or perhaps even centuries, making it still a good cash-cow for the medical industry.
To be fair, I should note that I don't think *all* medical research goes this way. Obviously some people dedicate their lives to the eradication of terrible diseases, conditions, etc. However, the overall agenda of the medical industry, much like any other, is cash gain.
On developing the world's first "Cyberbrain". That would truly be a "killer" application. Also they need to get cracking on "Prosthetic bodies" because if you can't cure an organ disorder just replace the whole damn body and hook it up via a cyberbrain.
Come on I want to be a "Ghost in the Shell" and I wouldn't mind being one even if I have to have a "intel Inside" sticker on my forehead.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
He may have a good point about making room for "wild ducks" in the research field, but I'm not sure we need more quacks in medicine...
Wow, awesome post.
This is because there has been a huge merging frenzy in the past decade, almost like an orgy of nested expressions that would do any LisP programmer proud. Toss in SmithKline and Beecham, blend with Burroughs and Wellcome, sprinkle in some Glaxo, bake at high temperature, and out comes a steaming hot GlaxoSmithKline. Then there's Pfizer, gobbling up Warner and Pharmacia / Upjohn, and then spitting out the bones, a process so repetitious that the people eaten up and summarily laid off produced a T-shirt with the oval blue logo in the style of the Pfizer logo that says, "Pfired!"
Someone my dad used to work with (former Upjohn -> Pharmacia-Upjohn -> Pfired employee) took a picture of the downtown Kalamazoo building from across the parking lot, a year and a half after the buyout. In the foreground: light posts with banners hanging from them saying things like "Pfizer -- we love where we live!" and "Pfizer -- building communities together!" and other such drivel that was used to make people feel better in the early aftermath of the buyout. In the background: A crane and wrecking ball, destroying the downtown building.
A perfect metaphor for Pfizer's operations. I really need to get it up online so I can link it in discussions like this.
*BUT* they don't give up! With doctors pointing out that Emperor AstraZeneca's new clothes don't really cover their genitalia, AZ aims at a new market: the general public. AZ thinks up a new brand name that doesn't sound remotely like "Prilosec", so that the public won't realize that they're getting the same thing.
Thus explaining why their advertising expenses exceed their R&D expenses -- it takes a lot of money to convince the same old crap is new again.
BTW, do you know if this case resulted in a patentable change in the chemical manufacturing process? I know they patent not just the molecules but the process for making them, and I've been postulating that a big reason they do these little "side-grades" of drugs is to get around the fact that the old patent is expiring by getting a drug just new enough to slap a new patent on.
So, my fellow Slashdotters: don't fret about medical research. This is just another case of A Big Company that is Supposedly Innovative but actually only knows how to bluster and pretend to run research labs while it Eats Up Other Companies. Meanwhile, a New Way Of Thinking, which has actually been around for a long time, is gathering force and making its presence felt.
That does make me feel better. The idea that we can have both great new medical advances and witness the slow painful death of those Big Pharma Phuckers makes me smile. But doesn't it seem probably that on their way down, Big Pharma will suck up and destroy a great many of these upstarts?
The enemies of Democracy are
Woooossshhhhh another one right over your head!
tl;dr
I think he took that a bit seriously...
:)
*I* thought it was funny. Both the comment and the fact that someone would flame a joke.
(Pssst - your agression is showing)
...virus protein shells with ultra-short frickin' laser pulses?
That was just one big medical advance for last week.
Mr. Grove, exactly what did YOU do last week?
And he forgot to mention patents did he ? These companies are just sucking on the accomplishments of the last century, bringing nothing into human civilization for the last 50 years. They have grown stale and harmful.
Read radical news here
A very good comment. I'd be interested if you have data to the contrary, but I suspect that most development of drugs (beyond some initial leads) tends to happen in fairly large pharma companies. Once you have a compound that has some activity in an assay the process of developing it and testing it is fairly streamlined these days. It costs a fortune, and it benefits significantly from economies of scale.
Small companies can outsource a lot of it to CROs/etc, but it probably isn't any more expensive just to license it to a major player that has some space in their pipeline. These deals are structured in various ways. Sometimes it is just a lump sum, but more often it is an ongoing relationship with milestone payments if the drug works out. Sure, the reward is lower if the drug does become big, but the risk is a LOT lower if it fails and the small research-driven company can focus its effort on more R&D for the next drug and less on how the previous drug is doing in trials.
I'm not sure that the summary is universal - not all major pharma companies have been dominated by merger activity.
To some degree it might have been inevitable - you can only have so much competition in an industry. Sure, the drug industry used to sustain all those companies, but costs have risen a lot in the last 20 years.
I think the big problem is that all of the "easy" drugs have been taken. Drug development used to consist of running huge libraries of compounds against targets and finding hits. To some degree this is still the case, but all the low-hanging fruit is gone. The trick is finding new targets, and that requires advances in biochemistry. You aren't going to find the next antibiotic by just randomly screening molecules against bacteria - those libraries were all mined to death in the 80s. And antibiotics don't pay well in any case.
Also - your new drug has to be better than existing drugs to be of any use. Existing drugs work pretty well - raising the bar significantly.
Don't get me wrong - I think a lot of drug executives spent too much time enjoying their $5/pill margins and forgot that those pills are only patented for a decade (effectively). However, I don't think this is the full picture.
There, fixed that for you.
Modeling biology is complicated. Very very complicated. Sure, we may develop better algorithms at some point, but even proving that they're correct takes massive computing power. Do a little reading on the Folding@Home project for example.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Holy shit, man. Not only did you most likely RTFA, you wrote way too much for the average Slashdoter to read.
:-)
What I have a problem with is...
"This is because they are not bringing new drugs to market. I said that Big Pharma was not bringing new drugs to market. I blame this on the profit-centred, corporate-minded groupthink that has been running Big Pharma. In a nutshell, Big Pharma has been mismanaged."
A mismanaged company will inevitably fall to competition, unless there are other environmental forces, forcing companies into this mismanagement. In this instance, the primary force is Government (The FDA).
They have removed the competitive need to be first to market, with the competitive need to be the first to patent.
I didn't read the rest of your post, it was too long for my interest in this topic. Hell, all I wanted to read was a series of about 20 "Frist Psot" comments and some jokes, with a side of business/economic/political rhetoric.
So in conclusion... thanks for ruining it for me... jerk!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
In other words, the bottleneck is the algorithm, just as I said. Keep in mind that protein folding is actually relatively nice for hard problems that scientists actually will throw computational power at. Calculation of the perturbation series of the standard model for the combination of the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces is a far harder problem. I don't have a good feeling for the relative complexity, but my understanding is that calculating the next order of perturbation (that is calculating the contribution of "order N" which comes from a series of particle interactions with N loops) is something like doubling the size of your protein chain.
It wouldn't make any sense in that context to complain that computers aren't doubling fast enough. The problem is that it takes a rapidly growing number of doublings to map out even the next level of perturbation. Either we come up with better algorithms or we're just not going to know much about the perturbation series for the standard model (or whatever takes its place).I think the big problem is that all of the "easy" drugs have been taken. Drug development used to consist of running huge libraries of compounds against targets and finding hits. To some degree this is still the case, but all the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Yes, this is clearly true.
Also - your new drug has to be better than existing drugs to be of any use. Existing drugs work pretty well - raising the bar significantly.
This is clearly not true. Did you miss the story in the GP about Prilosec and Nexium?
A lot of the anti-depressants on the market, ones making the news due to unintended side effects, aren't in fact much more effective clinically than older ones like Prozac. They mostly just come with a different -- and less well understood -- set of side effects. "Better" isn't a simple ratchet, it's a multidimensional thing that can be hard to pin down. And when something is hard to pin down, that's where marketing comes in to try to pin it down for you in a way favorable to the company selling the "better" product.
This shouldn't be that surprising if you believe the first point you made. Finding new, better drugs is increasingly difficult, but yet new drugs are coming out regularly. The odds that all of these represent significant improvements rather than side-steps that do little more than allow them to get a new patent is very low.
Don't get me wrong - I think a lot of drug executives spent too much time enjoying their $5/pill margins and forgot that those pills are only patented for a decade (effectively).
No, no, the problem is that they have been all too painfully aware of the time limits on patents. Their entire strategy revolves around making sure that once the patent on one drug expires, there's another patented drug lined up to replace it. Yet as you observed, finding new drugs which are actual improvements over old drugs is growing ever more difficult. So when they can't do that they find one that is different enough that it can be patented, then just play up whatever minor advantages it may have (while downplaying the disadvantages) via advertising.
With this strategy, advertising is actually more important than the drug research itself, which is why they spend more on advertising than they do on research.
The enemies of Democracy are
Actually my understanding is that the parent is correct in saying that Big Pharma is weak in the research department on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Ideas are difficult to put on an assembly line, and as with IT, you find small startups and universities having the most good ideas. Big Pharma needs R&D and expertise in-house, but they're very alert to what the startups are doing.
I haven't studied the development/approvals process in detail but there really aren't major economies of scale to be had that I've seen. Trials are insanely expensive, there's just no way around it. You can outsource big swaths of it to make what economies you can of it, but remember the key elements here aren't dollars or personnel, it's time and risk.
On the finance side, what I've mainly seen is startups getting funded by venture capital firms. You'll see different firms jumping into Phase I trials and pre-trial than you will funding a firm with drugs in phase IIb or III trials. As you point out, there's a risk (and time!) to reward ratio that makes it worth the high risk and long payback horizon, and that of course decreases as a drug moves further towards approval.
Startups stay pretty lean; they outsource whatever they can and avoid unnecessary expenses. So most big and mid-size pharmas, instead of licensing individual drugs, will just go ahead and buy the whole company if they're small enough. Big payoffs and easier for the acquirer to manage.
Finally, on your point about the compounds themselves. Small molecule pharmaceutical research is actually in decline. As our knowledge of the genome advances, we've become much more sophisticated about mapping the chain of events in a disease. Large molecule "biologics" are becoming increasingly precise in their actions. That improved effectiveness and reduces side effects; it also reduces the value of old-style brute force research methods. The next big thing in pharma are drugs tied to particular genetic traits of patients. This GREATLY improves safety and efficacy, but means more drugs with limited markets. That's bad for big pharma-- after a government takeover of the industry I'd call this their greatest threat. This could be the Age of the Startup if the capitalist system continues and biologics continue taking over.
remember the key elements here aren't dollars or personnel, it's time and risk
Agreed (and I think that it is tempting to loose sight of this in the effort to reduce costs and personnel). However, both time and risk benefit from economies of scale. If this is a company's 75th drug development/launch and a particular project team's 3rd the risk is FAR lower than if you're a startup reinventing the wheel. Likewise you don't waste as much patent time making contacts and developing your processes. In the time it takes a startup just to find a reliable supplier of API (and do all the necessary GMP audits) they could have just as easily cemented a licensing agreement with a major pharma. That major pharma can very quickly make the API themselves or use one of their many existing external partners to do it. Every other step of the process is already lined up as well. A startup would waste a lot of time reinventing the drug development process, and if they discover they missed something that takes a year to complete (such as some safety study) they could end up with major delays. And then if the drug takes off then they still need to find some way of promoting it and scaling up to market-scale manufacture.
The startups only need to get one thing right to make big money - the initial discovery. So, why jeopardize 80% of the reward trying to capture the last 20% (which you only get it you execute perfectly)? You'd do better to spend your time discovering some new drug for another 80% return...
I agree with you on the challenges of tailored therapies. If companies find ways to succeed in that model they could really pull ahead. This kind of approach also is likely to be more likely to yield cures for many of the complex diseases that have remained elusive (psychiatric issues, systemic problems like diabetes, cancer, etc). Most of these conditions probably have dozens of causes, and if you can break down patients into specific groups with unique therapies you're more likely to help them.