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.'"

Comments

If Intel did medical research...

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel a car analogy coming on...

Re:Breakthroughs?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what your saying is e need a smaller, new pharm. company to come along and make a smaller, more powerful medication?

Next up... Car industry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Former Intel CEO rips automotive industry for not doubling fuel efficiency and halving cost every 18 months.

Re:Breakthroughs?

[ackthpt]

Actually, Intel doesn't have to deal with artificial rights activists protesting outside their labs to free the poor microchips they're experimenting on, nor do they have to jump through HUGE FDA hoops when they're ready to scale up to live environment testing of their advances. The folks at Intel have the luxury of playing a lot faster and looser than medical researchers, because a failed attempt at increasing clock speed by 5% usually doesn't kill a living being.

I agree with you 100.000000000137468%

Re:Apples with oranges

[UbuntuDupe]

Alright, then let's compare like with like!

If pharma advanced like processors:

-Time for a cold/allergy medicines to kick in would halve every 18 months.
-Medicines would be cheap, but you'd have to buy them in five-year supplies at a time.
-No one would be able to figure out what Mac molecules look like.
-Pill would do anything you wanted, except for the 50% of the time that you vomit them.

And if computers had to follow pharma regs:

-Chipmakers would have to run extensive tests to ensure they were Turing complete.
-Chips would be pulled off the market if they ran into any unpredicted infinite loops.
-Every computer would come with a book full of warnings including such gems as "Not intended for use underwater."
-Computer commercials would occasionally just mention the product in a positive light with no real information about functionality. (Oh wait, they already do that ...)

Dilbert still has the answer

[idontgno]

(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."

Re:Breakthroughs?

[Guysmiley777]

You know who else didn't give two shits about Godwin's Law?




Hitler.

Re:Breakthroughs?

[eniac42]

Wouldn't that be 99.9993145938% ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

Re:Basic Research

[Anonymous Coward]

You went back to 1977, had a stroke, heart attack, major car wreck, testicular cancer, and chronic stomach ulcers, all in five minutes?? You must be tired! ;)

Re:You're still talking out of your @$$

[npsimons]

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.

Why do we need a million different calculator programs? Isn't one, or even a dozen good enough to cover all cases? Reversing the analogy, how many penis pills do we need? If it's so easy to make them, why can't people work on the hard stuff, then if an emergency need arises for penis pills they can whip out (pun intended) a new penis pill?