Are you serious? You do realize that the researchers you mention are normal people - we get colds, we get cancer, we get diabetes, we bleed and we die. It's small minded of you to think that researchers don't have the motivation to try and cure diseases. Hell, the reason half of us go into research in the first place is because someone we know and love has a disease.
While I agree that big pharma would generally rather put their money into treatments than cures, you can't ignore drugs like Gleevec (developed by Novartis = big pharma). Gleevec is more or less a magic bullet that for all intents and purposes cures a form of childhood leukemia. I mean it just seems like you're saying that all scientists are in it together to stop progress on curing diseases, and that is just not true. Yes, pharma can cut research on whatever they want, but if they were truly onto something that was going to cure a disease, they would bring it to market. For one, the patent would generate a ton of revenue, and the positive press would send their stock prices through the statosphere.
And you can't ignore that a lot of research is done by individuals, and results are published in the public domain. They're not hiding anything. If they could honestly cure something right now, they would - if for no other reason then to feed their ego by winning a Nobel.
I'm not going to comment on the pharmaceutical industry because I think everyone realizes and has mentioned the flaws with science done to improve the bottom line. But I agree and disagree with the following statement:
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 I think it's ignorant to make the claim that academic researchers haven't made any big discoveries in recent years considering the field of RNA interference and antibody therapy are in their infancy, started in academia, and may ultimately lead to very promising treatments, if not cures. RNAi is the definition of a process discovered with absolutely no intention of trying to alleviate disease (it was researched to understand coloration patterning of petunias), and yet is one of the biggest advances of our time, and we've only scratched the surface of its usefulness. There are plenty of other examples, but these are some of the more recent ones.
But I think the larger problem here is the system. You want to know the main reason breakthroughs in academic research lag......lack of funding. The NIH budget hasn't been increased above the level of inflation since, oh say, 2003 (did something big that requires a lot of money start that year, I can't remember). Professors/principal investigators spend at least 50% of their time these days writing and revising grant applications - both to government and private agencies - and the funding rates are the lowest they've been in a longtime (oh, and you typically accomplish less than half of what you propose in these things if you're lucky). You can't expect progress if you're not willing to fund it.
And this has a trickle down effect. The system is essentially feudal. Each PI has his/her peon graduate students who get paid a pittance for doing the lion's share of the work. In the process, they either become disenfranchised and leave academia for the lure of the dollars big pharma (or business) is offering, or they stick with it and have to do a post-doc (essentially graduate school all over again with very little pay increase). If you make it through your post-doc (and this is tough because they PI's don't want to pay your salary, and the NIH funds less than 15% of the applications it gets), you might be lucky enough to be junior faculty. At this point the university gives you a few years to establish yourself - you work 80 hours a week fixated on publishing something, anything, so that you have a shot at tenure. You don't care if it's relevant to human disease - or even if it advances knowledge of a biological process - you just want it published, so you can apply for more grants and try to build up your little fiefdom so the university might give you tenure. All the while, the 85 year old professors who have been on the university payroll since world war 2 won't retire because they're living the life. They already went through what you went through, and there's no way they're retiring anytime soon. They are the definition of stagnation and taking up valuable professorships that young innovators deserve (but they all left grad school early to go work for google, so there aren't that many left now anyway). Say you make it through this and you get tenure. Well, now that you've been to hell and back, there's no way you're going to give up what you earned. So you setup camp and stay on the university payroll until you're 85 and start saying ridiculous things like our boy James Watson.
Is it that obvious that I'm a 5th year grad student and can't stand the system I'm a part of....
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Are you serious? You do realize that the researchers you mention are normal people - we get colds, we get cancer, we get diabetes, we bleed and we die. It's small minded of you to think that researchers don't have the motivation to try and cure diseases. Hell, the reason half of us go into research in the first place is because someone we know and love has a disease. While I agree that big pharma would generally rather put their money into treatments than cures, you can't ignore drugs like Gleevec (developed by Novartis = big pharma). Gleevec is more or less a magic bullet that for all intents and purposes cures a form of childhood leukemia. I mean it just seems like you're saying that all scientists are in it together to stop progress on curing diseases, and that is just not true. Yes, pharma can cut research on whatever they want, but if they were truly onto something that was going to cure a disease, they would bring it to market. For one, the patent would generate a ton of revenue, and the positive press would send their stock prices through the statosphere. And you can't ignore that a lot of research is done by individuals, and results are published in the public domain. They're not hiding anything. If they could honestly cure something right now, they would - if for no other reason then to feed their ego by winning a Nobel.