Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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.
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
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.
- G
Start a happiness pandemic
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
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.
America's a different market. Up until recently, generally speaking, people wanted technology put into performance, not efficiency. You can have both (Tesla) but it will cost you. People from the Union of Concerned Scientists preach that with products available today, you can increase the fuel efficiency of any automobile on the market by 30-80% depending on the auto. Auto manufacturers are only just getting around to it because, finally, gas prices are high enough that Americans are asking for it.
As for Harley's: it's a taste. Like buying the biggest pickup truck you can find and jacking it up to 12 feet in the air. Or owning a hummer. Or a Ferrari for that matter. Now you might say, "a Ferrari? That's cool though!" 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.
Personally, I hate Harleys. People make them loud as a cannon, drive down your road at 6 in the morning to go to work. "Loud pipes save lives," they say, which is utter crap because I can't even hear the tractor trailer next to me with my windows up, how the heck am I going to hear you coming up behind me? Whatever, it's a feeling of power thing, I gather, sitting on a big rumbling beast of metal.
Science needs to stay spread out and constantly looking at different things, not rehashing the same stuff over and over because it's easy. I mean, you never know, the cure something like Crohn's might lead by accident to the cure for cancer! That's why you need to blaze new trails and constantly strive for incrimental improvements across all disciplines of medicine.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
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.
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]