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U.S. Biomedical Research 'Unsustainable' Prominent Researchers Warn
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "The U.S. biomedical science system 'is on an unsustainable path' and needs major reform, four prominent researchers say. Researchers should 'confront the dangers at hand,' the authors write, and 'rethink' how academic research is funded, staffed, and organized. Among other issues, the team suggests that the system may be producing too many new researchers and forcing them to compete for a stagnating pool of funding."
The only issue noted was too many researchers. Well, that's a self-correcting problem, isn't it.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It sure took you some time to notice the bloody obvious, folks. The only odd thing about this is why you only mention biomedical research.
Because pretty much all other fields have exactly the same problem: fairly massive over-production of graduates - in particular, people with a PhD. In times of shrinking university enrolments, and shrinking populations (in the West, that is). No one will ever need that many faculty. And for most jobs outside uni, that time spent in PhD comics land is not a good preparation. At all.
Agreed. We should toss all biomedical researchers into a massive lab along with a couple deadly strains of something. The ones who learn to make something that protects them wins and get to stay in the field. The rest... well, there's no reason to worry about them anymore. If too many researchers pass the first test, something more deadly is used until we cut the number down far enough.
Too many bioscientists are not a problem if we can come up with a sufficiently high matching hunchback population. http://project-apollo.net/mos/
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Interestingly, the same things can be said about High Energy Physics - in the last half century, physicists have figured out the standard model of particle physics. Meanwhile, the cost of pushing back the energy frontier (cf LHC) is at the level where it funding is required from a large portion of the Western world to make a major discovery. Research is driven by grad students and post docs, most of whom can never get a permanent position, while funding is diminishing in real terms.
For me, the current academic system needs updating from the 19th century. It is bad for science not to make the change, because we see the good staff leaving to find a proper job.
the team suggests that the system may be producing too many new researchers and forcing them to compete for a stagnating pool of funding.
This is called capitalism AKA the shitty system that happens to work better than than ever other system that has ever been tried by man, so long as the metric is "how much can our species accomplish". Whether it is better if your metric is "how many people starve to death" is less straightforward and left as an exercise to the reader.
The authors say the following related to the oversupply of graduate students,
"Economists point out that many labor markets experience expansions and contractions, but the labor market for biomedical research does not appear to respond to classic market forces"
So long as we consider response to government spending a "classic" market then it is easy to understand the oversupply of graduates. A graduate student is offered 25k/year but a bachelors in biology can hardly find a job outside of the fast-food industry. I think that one of the few job markets worse than that of recent biomedical PhDs is that of recent B.S holders of biology degrees. It's not that we all want to be scientists, its that for those of us with even a decent amount of talent can find no better work.
Overall most of their suggestions are spot on. We need to change the incentive structure and we need to incentivise research by scientists, rather than by legions of underpaid and underemployed grad students.
Sincerely,
-Biomedical grad student
A bachelor in biology is no worse than a bachelor in some liberal arts field: you learn to read, write, and reason. There are lots of jobs open to you, just not in science.
Some may think we are spending gobloads of money on some "Big" physics with those gigantic particle smashers, but all of that pales in comparison to the amount of public money we throw at medical research.
Damn straight it ain't "sustainable".
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Government funding is like this... Rather then getting a feedback loop where research generates profits which pay for expansions which lead to more jobs. What you instead have is a static grant being offered by the government. When that is consumed there is no more and the government not making any money on the process can't afford to engage in a feedback system.
Now, a private system is going to have its own issues but those issues will not be an over production of researchers competing for finite grant money.
And before anyone tells me this is a bad idea or that we need the government to do all this stuff... understand where I am coming from here. We had tens of thousands of engineers working for the military industrial complex and then the cold war ended... result? Many of them were out of a job. And guess where many of them lived? California. It was and still is a big defense contractor state. And what did those engineers do? Most of them found jobs in the private sector and to a large extent their technical contribution made the tech explosion in California happen. Suddenly business had access to a glut of engineers. And that is what we got out of it.
So... consider that we might do well to push a lot of these bio medical researchers at the private sector... It might do them well, it might do their fields well, and it might do the nation well.
And hey, the US Federal government might actually see a monetary return through their tax recipes. So... everyone wins.
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their technical contribution made the tech explosion in California happen.
What you said sounded very exciting right up to that point. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
About 20 years ago, when I was in academia, it was only very few who were sufficiently keen to go into a research career.
Nowadays it seems that so many people end up as post-docs. Today I would have to think twice about whether even to get a doctorate, as I'm not sure it has so much meaning.
So, has the definition changed? Is it much easier to get a PhD? I understand also that more people are going into higher education in the first place, which must mean a lowering of the standard required for entry - does this also happen at higher levels?
Explain your problem.
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Here's the problem with Biotech. It is beholden to the shareholder.
Look at the recent crash and rubble in the biotech sector. All too often, main street investors are sitting there wondering why they're holding the bag for the fraud that is obvious and rampant in the biotech securities sector.
The scam goes a little something like this:
1) Invent some promising new wonder drug and tell investors you expect to get on the fast track for FDA compliance
2) Watch stock price pump from investors looking to get in on the next big pharmaceutical that will change the lives of people with disease X
3) Insiders sell millions of their shares
4) Having made their profit, terminate the expensive clinical studies, citing "unforeseen problems" with the drug
5) Rinse, repeat
These pharmas never get past Phase I clinicals because they don't want the expense. They make a lot more money rinsing drugs they know will fail through a partial Phase I, never having to pay for the *really* expensive and risky trials.
Why does it matter? Is the global pool of money stagnating? Who cares if it is here in the US? So what? So people in other countries will take the lead. Its not really a big deal....we are all human; this my team your team BS is getting old.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The problem with your assertion is that the private sector job opportunities, for the most part, vanished following the crash in 2008. The entity we refer to as 'Big Pharma' only exists as a 'Big Profit' engine... not as a large-scale employer. Most of the private sector jobs for biomedical scientists disappeared and the few that remain are very difficult to obtain, even for someone with a PhD.
There are two problems; one is that many researchers focus on research and are terrible at and hostile to teaching. However, your statistics are also important to the conversation. The real problem in the university sense is that many fields are creating more graduates thn can plausibly bcome employed, including forestry, which for a few years was producing more graduates a year than total non-university jobs in the field. (yes, if every professional forester got fired and replaced with a new graduate, some of the new graduates wouldn't have gotten a job.
Being in the field, I would like to add that transition to private industry might be more difficult for biomedical researchers as compared to engineers. Private employers are mainly pharma, some agriculture. Most employment trajectories leave research and even the biomedical field entirely. That being said, the standards for getting a PhD seem rather low nowadays (Europe/US) such that a tightening of standards could potentially lead to a virtuous circle (less researchers, better quality -> better research -> higher standards).
The problem with your assertion is that the private sector job opportunities, for the most part, vanished following the crash in 2008
Same situation as when the Cold War ended. the recovery of the private sector will happen in spite of Obama's best efforts; expecting governments around the world to come up with the money during a major recession is unrealistic.
Well, there's a bit of truth to that. There's a shit ton of money to be made in biomedical, but I've stopped investing because I'll take a lower ROI v.s. the blatant threat of all of the research I fund being stolen. I'm fascinated with the invention of new drugs, and have been very successful at investing in it (not a researcher, probably, actually, close to that 1900's model of private funding, though we pool it in corporate entities now). However, when the largest nations are either blatantly stealing the product, publicly stealing it, or announcing that they intend to, the risk is too high. So, now what I fund tends to be electronic buables that get thrown away in 2 years when they're replaced with a newer and more interesting toy.
An interesting article on why people would work for less than minimum wage (grad students working 16 hr days), in hopes of hitting the big time, just like people selling drugs, hopjng to become the drug lord:
http://alexandreafonso.wordpre...
I'd rather push you off into private practice that create some uber elite priesthood that subsists entirely on government grants.
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I disagree that a bachelor in bio learns you reasoning. The learning consists almost entirely of memorizing anonymized "facts", when real science occurs at the personal level in historical context. Further I doubt many bio bachelor holders know much of any philosophy of science or logic.
What's happening in many States is researchers are moving to private sector. In Minnesota at any given time there are over 400 biomed start-ups in operation. Many started in the University system but moved out for various reasons. Mostly that the academic sector moves at a glacial pace in terms of commercialization. It's not that there isn't as much money in totality, it's that a large component has moved to Venture Capital instead of grants.
And why is that?
Could it be that the FDA makes your industry a living hell?
That's what I've heard from the pharma companies. They say that they spend so much money complying with the FDA that they have very little for anything else.
We have drug factories around the country that are going broke despite selling all their product. Some of them run 24 hours a day to meet demand. There are still shortages and they are still going broke.
I have to assume that's the FDA because nothing else could have that effect on US drug manufacturers and no one else.
In any case, I'm not going to compound the mistakes of over-regulation with over-subsidization.
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Most of the authors' analysis rings true, but Dr. Harold Varmus, in particular, contributed enormously to the perverse incentives he now complains about when, as NIH Director, he mandated "modular grants", in which scientists simply request grant support in multiples of $25,000 without the traditional detailed budget and without any salary data. Indeed, scientists were (and still are) expressly forbidden from including in their application any information on exactly how they proposed to spend the requested grant money or what they were paying themselves. The predictable response of the universities (and I speak here from first-hand experience) was to strongly encourage faculty to put larger portions of their salaries onto grants, and be rewarded with higher base salaries. Such policies were enthusiastically sold by department chairmen to upper-level administrators as a way of incentivizing faculty to acquire more grant support, while at the same time raising faculty salaries, all at zero net cost to the University. The fact that all this occurred at the same time as the doubling of the NIH budget only encouraged the process. Now the hard times are here again, money is tight, and support personnel are being let go, but faculty are not giving up their higher salaries and the universities aren't going back to paying faculty from university funds to do research, at least not without a fight.
xkcd.com/1007
You do not take a PHD because you prepare for a job. You take it because youa re passionate for the subject and might hope to continue the subject. if you think a PhD is to prepare for an job, or even education in general at high level, you got it wrong. Anyway i disagree about not being a good preparation either : the autonomy and the effort needed to do a PhD "over prepare" for practically any job except a few % out there.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The problem with "private practice" is that the product horizon that most companies care about is 5 years or fewer. Most major scientific advances take significantly longer than that to be commercialized. ARPANET was established in 1969 and already built on substantial research. Imagine the project was required to generate a substantial profit in 5 or fewer years. ARPANET wasn't even declared operational until 1975 -- already beyond that horizon.
Somewhere science needs to be driven by 10-30 year goals to make these types of advances. The private sector hasn't had that type of vision since the loss of their major research labs (Bell Labs, Kodak Research Labs, etc). If we want our children and grandchildren to have access to more effective medical care at lower cost than we have now, the only way to do it is through publicly funded research.
You bring up an interesting example. But, you should consider that there is a fundamental difference between engineering and research. The article was written by highly successful researchers with experience with policy making. I agree with their perspective. From the article,
"Competition in pursuit of experimental objectives has always been a part of the scientific enterprise, and it can have positive effects. However, hypercompetition for the resources and positions that are required to conduct science suppresses the creativity, cooperation, risk-taking, and original thinking required to make fundamental discoveries."
I think the difference in engineering (building and designing new things from what is already known) and research (trying to figure out stuff that nobody knows) requires different types of support for success. Stability is the key for research to encourage intellectual risk-taking. The problem with the current funding situation is that it stifles innovation and the really basic research. The big ideas are frequently wrong and non productive, but when they are correct, they move biomedical research forward much more than all the short term projects combined.
Finally consider that research is shared knowledge. New insights must be shared for them to be useful. This is different from engineering, where a design or product can be protected and inventors can profit from its use by others.
I disagree. One of the points of the article was that grants were too safe. Government grants are necessary to pay for research that is high-risk but high reward. If I want to do a multi-million dollar study that maybe has a 98% chance of leading nowhere but has a 2% chance of curing cancer, that's a probably a terrible risk for private sector, but should be funded by the government. Instead, with so much competition, grant comittees are playing it safe and boring. That type of research can be funded by the private sector maybe.
They say that they spend so much money complying with the FDA that they have very little for anything else.
That's because the FDA requires actual proof that a drug does what it's claimed to do before they'll let it be marketed as such - oh, and it has to not have debilitating side effects. If we got rid of the FDA, the barriers to market would be vastly lower, but we'd be flooded with a huge number of placebos with deadly side effects. Really, it's shocking how often drug candidates make it to Phase III trials only to discover that they're effectively useless. Do you really want to get rid of that filter?
As to product horizons, there are a lot of companies that spend a lot of money on an ongoing basis in basic research and development.
Most of the aerospace companies research ideas for many years before they actually become products and many never do become products.
Chemical companies do the same thing.
the pharma companies can spend upwards of 10 years on a single drug... much longer then your 5 year figure.
I'm not sure how long Monsanto spends trying to put ice fish DNA in wheat but the whole process probably wasn't fast.
Don't tell me business doesn't do research. They do a lot of research. And in fact, they also offer a lot of grants to universities to research things for them.
Given all the scandals in bio medical academic papers over the last few years I find it suspect that they're begging for grant money now. There is huge potential for new medical technology and treatments. the market is very hungry for such things. Sadly genetically modified foods are taboo currently but you can probably still find a market for that as well. I think there is a lab in the UK that is cloning pets. That's a great idea. Rich people give you money and you get to continue your cloning research.
Figure something out. There is money out there. And if there isn't... then there isn't.
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consider that we might do well to push a lot of these bio medical researchers at the private sector
Many of us would love to move to the private sector. There's just aren't a lot of jobs there either. In my current specialty, there are hundreds of postdoctoral fellowships (and maybe a dozen faculty openings) for every industry position. I have much broader expertise than that, but employers typically aren't interested in anyone who doesn't fit the exact list of criteria that HR prepared. I've basically spent the last 6 years working as a full-time software developer but I can't even get responses to job applications because I'm still in academia, and competing with CS graduates with the right buzzwords on their resumes.
Obviously my choice of career path was poor, but there isn't some magic solution that can retroactively fix that problem.
Pharma spends a long time on successful drugs, but most of that is after the initial compound has been developed. Much of that is engineering, scaling up, and the FDA approval process. These are not research tasks.
Monsanto does a great job of using tools developed by publicly funded academic research labs to manipulate crops. What Monsanto doesn't do, is pay for someone to go understand how life exists in extreme conditions such as hot spring vents. Without such study, we wouldn't have the Taq polymerase that makes all of the work that Monsanto (or any other group doing genetic engineering) does possible.
There is still a lot of money in the fields you talk about, and I'm glad that there is because my research is in a well funded field. What I see when I look around is that the researchers who are doing the type of work capable of leading to the next big breakthrough -- for example the next Taq that changes the way we can interact with the world around us -- are not getting funded. The things that get funded right now are low risk projects with a clearly deliverable product, exactly as you describe. The problem with this incentive system is that researchers are avoiding the interesting questions and hardest challenges. Any researcher who decides to build a career trying to study something like hot spring vent bacteria because it's interesting would be immediately shot down by grant review panels. This is precisely what the linked manuscript describes.
In summary there is still money out there, but it's not being used in ways that are capable of leading to transformational advances. Business is not currently investing in that type of basic research (they invest in research, but targeted research towards a clearly defined endpoint).
In regards to hyper competition versus competition... these are not valid economic terms that can be applied to the market place.
What you have instead is an over supply of a good or service fighting over a finite market for those goods and services.
The end result is that those less able to compete will be squeezed out of the business entirely.
This is already happening and will not be stopped.
You can lament that but you'd as well lament the rising of the sun in the east or the tides going out in the morning. Its going to happen.
You can take these people private so they can diversify into other businesses applying their skills to something that is more scalable. Or they can suffer.
But simply demanding the federal spending taps get turned up every time you've over produced researchers is not practical.
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I'm not saying its the same... I'm saying that you have to find a home for a lot of these researchers in the private sector.
You can't expect the government to just throw money at researchers because they're out of work.
The grant system exists for all the things you were talking about. Its great.
But it isn't a bottomless money tap. If you need more, then you need to do what everyone else does. Get a job in a company that makes money.
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I'm not suggesting we get rid of the FDA. I'm suggesting that the FDA might be excessive.
Beyond that, I think there is room to have non-FDA approved medical procedures and drugs open to Americans.
Label it. Cover it in warnings. Whatever.
I am a HUGE believer in individual choice. If the consumer chooses to buy or use something that isn't government approved... that is their choice. Obviously make it clear to them so they don't do it by accident... but that's about it.
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I didn't say stop government funded research.
Why is it that when ever you say something might be excessive or that we might need to look at other options... people automatically assume you want to utterly destroy everything before in a giant scorched earth demolition derby?
I didn't say that.
Suggesting I did is merely an admission on your part that you didn't understand my post.
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I mean, let's be real: the US right wants lower taxes, and to spend it on as little as possible (except for defense).
The NIH, arguably the largest, and possibly best medical research organization in the world, has had their funding either stagnant or cut (remember the Sequester - it's still there). They then allege that corporate and academic research will take its place, and do better.
Riiight.
Where do the academics get theif funding? Surprise, a lot comes from the NIH.
Corporations, doing basic research, that may eventually lead to important discoveries? I mean, *really*, what kind of ROI is there for this quarter or the next quarter in *that*?
mark
ObUSTaxDeadlineDay: simplify the 1040:... eliminate forms D (capital gains) and B (dividends and interest)... roll them *DIRECTLY* INTO GROSS INCOME, and tax them *ALL* at the full rate, not 15% or less. And shut up, slashdotters, not mnore than 10 of you makes any major percentage of your income via stock trading, nor is ever likely to.
If by bottomless money tap, you mean that we would continue funding research in perpetuity, I think you are wrong. Unless we reach some state where we literally understand everything about the world around us, there will always be a place for research. If by bottomless money tap, you mean that we would be increasing the percentage of GDP that we put towards research, no one argues that.
My colleagues and I spend an enormous amount of time writing grants because about 5% of grants are being funded. From grant review panels, it is clear that approximately 20-30% of grants are worthy of being funded (i.e. are well thought out proposals to push the boundaries of our understanding forward). Once we get below that amount, we're essentially deciding on non-scientific merit about what we favor (the impact of previous publications, the institutions involved, how well the researchers are known, etc). This is bad for all biomedical science in the future, and will harm our competitiveness in the global economy. The months of person-effort that go into the rejected but worthy of funding proposals are also wasted.
The problem we are currently facing is that we have a biomedical research environment built for the situation 10 years ago, before a 25% cut in real dollars for publicly funded biomedical research. Each administration promises a return to these levels of funding, but instead dollars keep getting cut. This makes strategic planning in biomedical research institutions essentially impossible which leads to the current hypercompetitive environment. The article argues that, more than anything else, what we really need is clarity on what will be spent in the future (the article suggests a 5 year window for expected spending).
I feel your pain buddy. You're not alone and trust me even if you did go the corporate route that can happen. HR is full of myopic robots.
My best advice is to lie to get in the door just so you can talk to the guy that will be hiring you. Worst case you'll not get the job. But you'll have gotten an interview.
I lie to HR constantly. Its for their own good... they're idiots.
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Perhaps you should educate yourself in the differences between fundamental and applied research. Fundamental research is by definition not immediately monetizable. A famous (though maybe not the best) example is the laser; at the time its principles were realized, it was regarded an academic curiosity. Decades later came a sudden boom in laser applications, and nowadays, we could hardly imagine life without them. And yes, the same thing goes for biomedical research. A curious publicly funded discovery today could be the basis for a huge public health breakthrough 40 years from now, beyond the horizon of private companies looking forward.
I am a HUGE believer in individual choice. If the consumer chooses to buy or use something that isn't government approved... that is their choice. Obviously make it clear to them so they don't do it by accident... but that's about it.
I don't disagree with this, but a key issue is marketing and insurance coverage, not availability. Drugs that are legally available to consumers can't be marketed for purposes other than the conditions they were approved to treat, and companies have paid billions of dollars in fines for violating these rules. That doesn't prevent doctors from prescribing the drugs off-label, but insurance companies usually won't cover this (I know, I've tried), and because these uses can't be marketed, the revenues are vastly lower. I am 100% in favor of experimentation and consumer choice, but I don't like seeing companies push drugs with potentially debilitating side effects on people without actual evidence that they work.
Ike was a fuckin' pinko, right up there with Teddy Roosevelt.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It may be no worse, but it sure isn't way better. The sad truth is that many biology degree holders went into the field expecting biotech to be the next big boom sector. This wasn't just blind ignorance either, prominent business people and politicians have been parroting this ideology since the late 1990's (bill gates even has been quoted as saying that if he was in college now, he would study biotech... this was a number of years ago, I doubt he would say it as of late). The sad fact is that biotech has not been the revolutionary technology we had hoped. Biology is still too tedious and convoluted, the FDA has expanded its role and its arduous approval process for new products, the market for biotechnology products hasn't grown appreciably since the 90's, and the labor market for biotech experts hasn't grown at nearly the same rate as the pool of laborers.
I would like to conclude by saying this: if you were defending biology degrees by saying they are comparable to english degrees, you are doing a darn poor job.
Majoring in biology is one of the most popular majors for students interested in medical school (if not, the most popular major). And, of course, the process of getting into medical school these days is super hypercompetitive, so many of these students don't get in. Many of the students that don't get accepted after a BS, go on to either pre-health certificate programs (essentially a masters degree without the research component) or a full masters degree, in the hopes that they'll get a good enough GPA and other experience that medical schools will look for so they can get in. And even with a masters degree (yes, the certificate programs are a complete waste of time and only serve as cash cows for the universities offering them), the prospects of getting into medical school are still hypercompetitive. So many masters recipients go on to get their PhD. In the biomedical sciences. So part of this issue is a direct result of the hypercompetitiveness of medical school admissions.
Okay, I think you need to take your own advice, I didn't think you were suggesting abolishing government funding. I'm suggesting that we keep the same amount of state funded research, but put it into higher risk grants and let the private sector take over more sure projects, which will get the benefits you're hoping for.
If that is the learning you get out of a bachelor in bio, you've done college wrong.
The future is very difficult to predict. Quite a few people place faith in the notion that science and technology will offer a bail out for our pressing issues. At this point I doubt that will be true. What we do have is an over abundance of available labor but no means to pay for all that labor. That is going to continue and get much worse. Immigration, women working, working two jobs due to a bad economy and finally displacement of workers by technology is ganging up on us big time. What that really means is that we must change our theories of economy and assign the cost of operating society quite differently. It is now a given that most people will never have a really decent job. We will move to a system where pay checks are issued for not working by the government and oddly they must be decent sized pay checks. It is vital that all people have some arbitrary spending power in order to support businesses. In turn those businesses will assume the tax burdens formerly shouldered by the public. The reward of a business offering a very competitive product will be that people actually vote for them when they choose to spend their money at those businesses. They vote with their bucks so to speak. As far as care for the elderly folks that may remain one of the last tasks to be taken over by robotics and computers. It is harder to build machines that can deal with a huge number of random, trivial tasks, than it is to build the robot to deal with complex but repetitive tasks. The surgeon may be replaced faster than the aid that cares for the disabled or elderly.
I don't have complete control over my drug choices. Many of them have to be prescribed by a doctor, and many of them are too expensive for me to buy without insurance.
So, suppose my doctor chooses to prescribe only drugs that he thinks are likely to help, and unlikely to have bad side effects. Suppose I choose to restrict myself to such drugs. That is basically what the FDA wants to see documented, and it's what I'd like to see documented.
Now, if the industry can push for lower-quality drugs, why would they research the higher-quality ones? That takes work. Allowing less tested, and likely less effective, drugs into the marketplace probably lowers the number of more effective drugs available at any price.
Also, have you taken a look at pharmaceutical industry profits? It looks to me like they're doing just fine as it is.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The ending of exponential growth of academia around 1970: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Made it to biomed PhD... now I believe nothing I was taught, I always have to go check the original reports and investigate the circumstances surrounding them. Most often the literature is not sufficient to say anything one way or the other. If you don't see serious problems with the way evidence has been being assessed, either you are in a lucky field or unknowingly doing cargo cult science. ;)
by this logic we should make illegal all drugs that don't have a huge impact on the ailment in question.
Maybe we should ban all drugs that don't cure a disease outright... then they'll only come out with drugs that are cures!
You are using magical thinking. You are assuming that what the government legislates becomes reality.
This is as absurd as thinking that old English king could cause the tides to come in and go out at royal decree.
The pharma companies will produce lots of drugs. If you make many of them illegal to sell then you've simply limited your options. Nothing more or less.
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That's the purpose of a labor market: to bring supply and demand into balance. If pay for biotech graduates were substantially higher, more people would choose the field until pay went down again.
Another purpose of a market is that you use your own head instead of blindly following what politicians or business leaders tell you.
Seriously, the more that I see of today's profs the less impressed I am. Have you noticed how many announcements are made about various new items that never make it to market, or even to change the R*D? In some cases, it is all predicated on lies. The profs that the universities are hiring are HORRIBLE, and getting worse. Bad R*D and bad teaching.
The American universities are falling apart, in no small part, because of the quality of ppl being hired.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Um, how the hell did you get from what I said to what you said? I was, and am, advocating drugs that have a definite positive affect, without side effects that are too bad. That's basically what the FDA is looking for when they allow a drug onto the market.
I also fail to see the magical thinking. If the FDA requires evidence of safety and effectiveness before putting a drug on the market, then a drug on the market can be expected to be actually useful, without any consequences too dire (or the FDA will rescind its approval). What this has something to do with a guy named Knut who wanted to show he wasn't all-powerful escapes me.
Pharmaceutical companies concentrate on drugs they can legally sell, for some odd reason related to making money or something. If they're prevented from selling useless drugs, they'll try to make useful ones. They don't develop drugs at random, you know.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
We had tens of thousands of engineers working for the military industrial complex and then the cold war ended... result? Many of them were out of a job. And guess where many of them lived? California. It was and still is a big defense contractor state. And what did those engineers do? Most of them found jobs in the private sector and to a large extent their technical contribution made the tech explosion in California happen. Suddenly business had access to a glut of engineers.
Not only that, they also had access to all kinds of expertise that was developed using these precious federal dollars. Network communications, microprocessors, software architectures ...
How many of those talented engineers would've matured to that level if not for the cold war investments? You can certainly argue that government oversight of all this talent was misplaced, but you can't deny that it provided the essential opportunity for that talent to develop.
You're missing the point... the boom happened when they were released.
I am not suggesting we stop investing in biomedical research... I am saying that we need to shunt more of these people into the private sector.
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I disagree.
I think what you need to do is specify what the FDA has approved a given drug for... and then let the drug company say whatever they want about it with the condition that it make clear what the FDA said it did.
If you want to use a stomach parasite to treat your obesity then that is your own business. The FDA doesn't recommend it but it is your body. Just an example of something the FDA is unlikely to approve
This is the thing. Its like the abortion debate. MY body.
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This is the thing. Its like the abortion debate. MY body.
Again, you're not understanding my point. I'm not arguing with patient choice, I'm against companies marketing snake oil, which is one of the specific reasons that the FDA exists. The difference between these drugs and most other phony cures is that the drugs can actually kill you. I feel the same way about tobacco - I think people should be allowed to do anything they want as long as they don't harm anyone else, but I'm totally in favor of bans on cigarette ads. The distinction is between allowing potentially unsafe behavior, versus encouraging it.
And you're not understanding me.
I don't want to stop companies from marketing things.
That falls under free speech.
First Amendment.
Right there with freedom of religion.
What I think is reasonable is to let the FDA issue an "FDA recommended/approved" tag/sticker/etc that no one is allowed to use without FDA approval.
If the drug company doesn't want to bother with the FDA then they don't get the sticker. And if patients don't care if the FDA approves they can buy the drug without it.
See? Choice.
You do not have a right to tell me what I can and cannot say.
If I want to hold up a bottle of snake oil and say it cures everything... what right do you have to say otherwise unless you can prove that you know I am lying.
What if "I" believe it does cure everything?
And yes, people can get hurt if they just believe anything. But that's reality. People get hurt all the time by not being skeptical. Look at all the market failures that take down millions of people because they didn't pay attention. Would you say that people should be forbidden from investing in the market?
Point being... you can't make the world safe for idiots. "Buyer Beware" is not optional. It is not avoidable. It is a requirement one way or the other.
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