I am sorry, but with language like that, I have to assume you have a political agenda. i.e. I don't take you seriously.
That's not the worst of it - the claim about human ancestors in Bulgaria 7.2 MYA is incredibly speculative and based on a single study with very sparse evidence that just got published a few weeks ago. There are many alternative hypotheses, but as tends to be the case, the researchers went with the one that's likely to get them the most citations and media coverage. It's a perfect example of academic hand-waving combined with lousy science journalism.
Any time a Slashdot poster predicts that his or her post will be modded down, I automatically discount whatever else they had to say, because it's almost guaranteed that none of it will be especially insightful or original.
Every time an article about cancer therapies (or pharmaceuticals in general) comes up, someone always makes this claim. Aside from the sheer misanthropy of assuming the worst of everyone involved in drug development, it's spectacularly ignorant of human biology, modern medicine, and the pharmaceutical business. The truth is that most drug candidates end up being colossal wastes of money with nothing to show for it, usually because of poor efficacy in large-scale clinical trials (but occasionally due to unforseen side effects, although these are less of an issue with cancer drugs where the patient will probably die anyway), and it's still very difficult to catch these expensive failures earlier in the process. No sane pharma exec is going to tell researchers "let's drop this one, it works too well" because the reward for a cure will still be vastly higher than the money it costs to bring it to market, and meanwhile they'll probably lose 10x that amount on failures.
The only situation where there's a real financial disincentive to develop a cure is when the compound isn't patentable - however drug companies are very good at finding ways to patent things and at least in the US there is an "orphan drug" program that allows companies to patent drugs that would otherwise be public domain if they invest the work and money to take it through clinical trials. The supposed cures that are being ignored are usually outright quack stuff like Vitamin C or antineoplastons, which are of no interest because no one has convincingly shown they are actually useful.
This is the kind of circular argument that's impossible to refute. "Show me the numbers!" "Here are the numbers!" "No, those don't support my predetermined conclusion, so they must be fake." It's exactly like the Trump administration's attitude towards climate science, to pick one recent example. But whatever, the same strategy worked out so well for the fossil fuel interests that I guess I shouldn't be surprised that other ideologues have latched onto it.
This is common knowledge to anyone who has worked in the field - it's like asking for a citation for the claim that eating too much junk food leads to obesity. But here are two data points:
So that's less than 20% of approved drugs that are discovered in academia to begin with. Academic labs aren't large-scale operations - a single-investigator R01 grant from the NIH might be $5 million over 5 years, and most investigators won't have more than a handful of these. For the really big superstar labs, let's assume a very generous upper bounds of $10 million per year (not all of which is necessarily from the government). If it's a big multi-investigator project, maybe double that. Except for a handful of big centers (like the NIH itself, or genome sequencing centers), academia just doesn't operate at a large scale - a typical university research department is just an aggregation of many smaller units that are largely autonomous. The hidden advantage to these organizational limitations is that failed projects usually fail before anyone spends too much money on them. So let's hypothesize at the extreme, academics spent no more than $50 million per drug candidate. Compare to the numbers in the Wikipedia article.
Now, you could of course argue that because drug development is informed by the public-domain knowledge generated by taxpayer-funded researchers, drug companies are leaching off the public in that way too. I guess that's technically true (albeit difficult-to-impossible to quantify), but you might as well argue that because the government invented digital computers, companies like IBM and Intel should have been nationalized. (Note that the difference in salary between academia and big pharma is relatively large - to shift more drug development to academia, you'll need to raise salaries, or find a lot of scientists willing to work for academic salary while doing grunt work on massive projects that will mostly likely fail.)
To pick a more specific example, the NIH spends approximately $1.2 billion per year on aging-related research (including but not limited to Alzheimer's):
Most of that will be single-investigator grants, and as anyone who has worked in basic research can tell you, the majority of the grants that are funded won't lead to any immediate treatments, although they may provide useful information in the long term. In contrast, here is an estimate of the total cost per Alzheimer's drug being $5.7 billion (including failures, and keep in mind the overwhelming bulk of that is spent by drug companies):
This isn't to argue that taxpayer funding of basic research isn't valuable - it's absolutely essential IMHO. But most of what it produces isn't going to lead directly to new drugs or treatments.
Obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for a drug company, but I did receive funding from them as a government scientist, and receive a small bonus from IP licensing fees every year. Frankly it was far more trouble than it was worth; drug companies are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, even if you only talk to the scientists.
They do a few clinical trials after the government has done the really expensive stuff (what's called "Basic Research", IIRC).
This is simply wrong. The development process (which includes a lot more than just clinical trials) is far more expensive than the basic research component - and that's without even counting how many projects simply fail without anything to show for it.
Globes are (or were) common when I was in US public school (late 80s-late 90s) but no one ever taught us about the distortions in map projections. I specifically remember because I was (and am) a huge map geek and learned all this myself.
It's also worth noting that Zhang was hardly the only person to be working on this - Church's group published a very similar article in the same issue of Science in 2013, and about a half-dozen groups were reaching similar conclusions at the same time, but they weren't as aggressive about filing patents.
"Since the 1980s, an estimated 200 million Chinese live outside their officially registered areas and under far less eligibility to education and government services, living therefore in a condition similar in many ways to that of illegal immigrants... There are around 130 million such home-staying children, living without their parents, as reported by Chinese researchers."
Of course if the Chinese government was less secretive and obsessed with control, we could probably find more accurate statistics. But then this is the country that tried to discourage the US embassy in Beijing from posting accurate air pollution metrics because they were so embarrassing.
Veering slightly off-topic here, but in addition to what you said, the limitations on internal migration (for Chinese citizens) are absolutely insane by Western standards. Imagine that you couldn't attend school or obtain a driver's license or even legally reside in California despite being born there because your parents were "registered" as Illinois residents and moved without permission. As someone who rarely has to deal with any government agency more oppressive than the local DMV office, I can't imagine living in a country with that level of control over my life, even if they were handing out citizenship papers freely.
why is the test of worthiness for a medical procedure whether it can be "mass marketed"
Because someone has to pay for the research and development - which, please remember, involves large-scale clinical trials to get regulatory approval - and they're not going to front the money for a treatment that has no chance of recouping their investment, unless they have some other personal interest. You can wring your hands all you want about society's priorities, but new medical procedures aren't magically exempt from basic rules of supply and demand.
I wonder what kind of unmanned probes we could have by now if we didn't have to spend it on a military? If you don't have to worry about life-support and could afford redundant probes to deal with the risk of high-speeds, those things could be really fast, and we perhaps could be getting close-up data from the nearest star systems by now.
Sorry, not even close.
The estimate that I've seen for Project Icarus, which is one of the most thorough realistic concepts for interstellar exploration, was $100 trillion. (For comparison, global GNP is around $70 trillion, and US military budget is probably on the order of $1 trillion at most once you include stuff like the NSA - DoD alone is more like $700 billion. Some of which we do actually need for national defense.) That probe would have been unmanned and taken 50 years to reach Barnard's Star (only about 5 light years away), plus at least a 20-year development time. It required technology that, while theoretically possible, isn't even remotely close to working; it also required installing orbital infrastructure around at least one of our gas giants to mine the isotope(s) required for its particular flavor of fusion.
If we restrict ourselves to current-day or very-near-future technology, we might be able to get something to a nearby star in a few centuries for a much smaller sum. I'm totally in favor of starting work now, but I think the political will for spending large amounts of tax dollars on such a project is near zero.
If I were a pharm exec choosing which studies to support, there are many factors I would have to weigh in my decisions. A tacit bias towards non-curative medications is plausibly more profitable
This may make sense to a layman, but it completely misunderstands how the pharma business works. The vast majority of any research efforts they undertake, no matter what the goal, will crash and burn, some of them very expensively. Obviously the companies decide what to target based on likely profitability, but deciding not to pursue a promising possible cure because it might not make as much money as another promising lead that is merely a long-term palliative is absolutely batshit insane, because they have no idea which one is going to survive clinical trials.
The more general problem, of course, is that curing most diseases outright, and especially cancer, is often extremely difficult to do without killing the host, so it's not like there are many magic "cures" hidden away anyway. A truly comprehensive approach will probably require decades of further advances in biotechnology and our understanding of disease mechanisms before any pharma exec would even think of sinking money into trying to "cure cancer" outright.
Now, centuries later, the genetic corruption has festered long enough to surface again in a call to force everyone to submit to the power of those who seek to control the lives of everyone around them.
It hasn't "surfaced", it's been there all along. The only thing that's changed is that in this particular case, it's people you disagree with who are calling for authoritarianism.
Let me put it this way: I have no desire to force a smallpox vaccination into anyone. But I would consider it equally valid self-defense for the rest of us to point guns at willingly unvaccinated individuals and tell them to keep the hell away from us, because carriers for easily communicable and frequently fatal diseases might as well be waving a loaded gun around (especially if you're one of the unlucky few who has a legitimate medical reason for not getting vaccinated).
Schools are another matter: supposed your child shows up one day with the symptoms of smallpox. Should school officials (public or private) be prohibited from sending it home because of the danger to other students, simply because you're paying?
I apply a more general rule for the "or else" question: if I would not be comfortable personally enforcing a law, I won't support it. I don't have much of a problem with, say, the compulsory smallpox vaccinations that used to occur, since willingly unvaccinated individuals would be putting me in huge danger simply by breathing the same air. (Although in this case, banishment would indeed be an option.) Or for MMR, relatively harmless in comparison to smallpox but still easily transmissible, I have no problem telling the parents of willingly unvaccinated children that their brats are not welcome in public schools. To me, these responses are commensurate with the public health threat of unvaccinated individuals.
To repeat what I said earlier: simply being in the same classroom as a student with HPV does not expose anyone to the disease, therefore there is no justification for requiring vaccination as a condition of attendance. If you think otherwise you must have gone to a very strange school.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sorry, but with language like that, I have to assume you have a political agenda. i.e. I don't take you seriously.
That's not the worst of it - the claim about human ancestors in Bulgaria 7.2 MYA is incredibly speculative and based on a single study with very sparse evidence that just got published a few weeks ago. There are many alternative hypotheses, but as tends to be the case, the researchers went with the one that's likely to get them the most citations and media coverage. It's a perfect example of academic hand-waving combined with lousy science journalism.
Any time a Slashdot poster predicts that his or her post will be modded down, I automatically discount whatever else they had to say, because it's almost guaranteed that none of it will be especially insightful or original.
And if they have good health insurance, it would probably be a bargain compared to what is already being spent on existing HIV medications.
If I'm thinking of the same thing you are, the reason it is so expensive is that there are so few patients - like a few dozen. (It's not even clear to me why they pursued that in the first place, given that it seems like it would be impossible to even recoup their initial investment, much less make a profit.) There is a much larger pool of HIV patients (supposedly 1.2 million in the US alone), even if you just focus on rich nations, and they could still charge what sounds like an extortionate amount of money for it, because insurance companies and governments would love to not needing to keep paying for expensive HIV drugs every month. And whoever brings it to market could easily give it away to poor nations and still become spectacularly wealthy.
Every time an article about cancer therapies (or pharmaceuticals in general) comes up, someone always makes this claim. Aside from the sheer misanthropy of assuming the worst of everyone involved in drug development, it's spectacularly ignorant of human biology, modern medicine, and the pharmaceutical business. The truth is that most drug candidates end up being colossal wastes of money with nothing to show for it, usually because of poor efficacy in large-scale clinical trials (but occasionally due to unforseen side effects, although these are less of an issue with cancer drugs where the patient will probably die anyway), and it's still very difficult to catch these expensive failures earlier in the process. No sane pharma exec is going to tell researchers "let's drop this one, it works too well" because the reward for a cure will still be vastly higher than the money it costs to bring it to market, and meanwhile they'll probably lose 10x that amount on failures.
The only situation where there's a real financial disincentive to develop a cure is when the compound isn't patentable - however drug companies are very good at finding ways to patent things and at least in the US there is an "orphan drug" program that allows companies to patent drugs that would otherwise be public domain if they invest the work and money to take it through clinical trials. The supposed cures that are being ignored are usually outright quack stuff like Vitamin C or antineoplastons, which are of no interest because no one has convincingly shown they are actually useful.
The drugs that kept them alive were invented in Europe by the European governments because not a single US company would spend a dime on it.
[citation needed]
This is the kind of circular argument that's impossible to refute. "Show me the numbers!" "Here are the numbers!" "No, those don't support my predetermined conclusion, so they must be fake." It's exactly like the Trump administration's attitude towards climate science, to pick one recent example. But whatever, the same strategy worked out so well for the fossil fuel interests that I guess I shouldn't be surprised that other ideologues have latched onto it.
This is common knowledge to anyone who has worked in the field - it's like asking for a citation for the claim that eating too much junk food leads to obesity. But here are two data points:
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So that's less than 20% of approved drugs that are discovered in academia to begin with. Academic labs aren't large-scale operations - a single-investigator R01 grant from the NIH might be $5 million over 5 years, and most investigators won't have more than a handful of these. For the really big superstar labs, let's assume a very generous upper bounds of $10 million per year (not all of which is necessarily from the government). If it's a big multi-investigator project, maybe double that. Except for a handful of big centers (like the NIH itself, or genome sequencing centers), academia just doesn't operate at a large scale - a typical university research department is just an aggregation of many smaller units that are largely autonomous. The hidden advantage to these organizational limitations is that failed projects usually fail before anyone spends too much money on them. So let's hypothesize at the extreme, academics spent no more than $50 million per drug candidate. Compare to the numbers in the Wikipedia article.
Now, you could of course argue that because drug development is informed by the public-domain knowledge generated by taxpayer-funded researchers, drug companies are leaching off the public in that way too. I guess that's technically true (albeit difficult-to-impossible to quantify), but you might as well argue that because the government invented digital computers, companies like IBM and Intel should have been nationalized. (Note that the difference in salary between academia and big pharma is relatively large - to shift more drug development to academia, you'll need to raise salaries, or find a lot of scientists willing to work for academic salary while doing grunt work on massive projects that will mostly likely fail.)
To pick a more specific example, the NIH spends approximately $1.2 billion per year on aging-related research (including but not limited to Alzheimer's):
https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/...
Most of that will be single-investigator grants, and as anyone who has worked in basic research can tell you, the majority of the grants that are funded won't lead to any immediate treatments, although they may provide useful information in the long term. In contrast, here is an estimate of the total cost per Alzheimer's drug being $5.7 billion (including failures, and keep in mind the overwhelming bulk of that is spent by drug companies):
https://alzres.biomedcentral.c...
This isn't to argue that taxpayer funding of basic research isn't valuable - it's absolutely essential IMHO. But most of what it produces isn't going to lead directly to new drugs or treatments.
Obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for a drug company, but I did receive funding from them as a government scientist, and receive a small bonus from IP licensing fees every year. Frankly it was far more trouble than it was worth; drug companies are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, even if you only talk to the scientists.
They do a few clinical trials after the government has done the really expensive stuff (what's called "Basic Research", IIRC).
This is simply wrong. The development process (which includes a lot more than just clinical trials) is far more expensive than the basic research component - and that's without even counting how many projects simply fail without anything to show for it.
Globes are (or were) common when I was in US public school (late 80s-late 90s) but no one ever taught us about the distortions in map projections. I specifically remember because I was (and am) a huge map geek and learned all this myself.
But Zhang wasn't the only person to figure this out - George Church's group reported similar results at the same time. The patent office inexplicably decided not to get Church's testimony on the conflict.
It's also worth noting that Zhang was hardly the only person to be working on this - Church's group published a very similar article in the same issue of Science in 2013, and about a half-dozen groups were reaching similar conclusions at the same time, but they weren't as aggressive about filing patents.
From Wikipedia:
"Since the 1980s, an estimated 200 million Chinese live outside their officially registered areas and under far less eligibility to education and government services, living therefore in a condition similar in many ways to that of illegal immigrants... There are around 130 million such home-staying children, living without their parents, as reported by Chinese researchers."
Of course if the Chinese government was less secretive and obsessed with control, we could probably find more accurate statistics. But then this is the country that tried to discourage the US embassy in Beijing from posting accurate air pollution metrics because they were so embarrassing.
Veering slightly off-topic here, but in addition to what you said, the limitations on internal migration (for Chinese citizens) are absolutely insane by Western standards. Imagine that you couldn't attend school or obtain a driver's license or even legally reside in California despite being born there because your parents were "registered" as Illinois residents and moved without permission. As someone who rarely has to deal with any government agency more oppressive than the local DMV office, I can't imagine living in a country with that level of control over my life, even if they were handing out citizenship papers freely.
why is the test of worthiness for a medical procedure whether it can be "mass marketed"
Because someone has to pay for the research and development - which, please remember, involves large-scale clinical trials to get regulatory approval - and they're not going to front the money for a treatment that has no chance of recouping their investment, unless they have some other personal interest. You can wring your hands all you want about society's priorities, but new medical procedures aren't magically exempt from basic rules of supply and demand.
I wonder what kind of unmanned probes we could have by now if we didn't have to spend it on a military? If you don't have to worry about life-support and could afford redundant probes to deal with the risk of high-speeds, those things could be really fast, and we perhaps could be getting close-up data from the nearest star systems by now.
Sorry, not even close.
The estimate that I've seen for Project Icarus, which is one of the most thorough realistic concepts for interstellar exploration, was $100 trillion. (For comparison, global GNP is around $70 trillion, and US military budget is probably on the order of $1 trillion at most once you include stuff like the NSA - DoD alone is more like $700 billion. Some of which we do actually need for national defense.) That probe would have been unmanned and taken 50 years to reach Barnard's Star (only about 5 light years away), plus at least a 20-year development time. It required technology that, while theoretically possible, isn't even remotely close to working; it also required installing orbital infrastructure around at least one of our gas giants to mine the isotope(s) required for its particular flavor of fusion.
If we restrict ourselves to current-day or very-near-future technology, we might be able to get something to a nearby star in a few centuries for a much smaller sum. I'm totally in favor of starting work now, but I think the political will for spending large amounts of tax dollars on such a project is near zero.
If a pharmaceutical company finds a cure for cancer, and decides it would hurt their bottom line to release it, what do you call that?
Time to file their business folk, because a cure for cancer is so insanely valuable that they'd be idiots not to pursue it.
If I were a pharm exec choosing which studies to support, there are many factors I would have to weigh in my decisions. A tacit bias towards non-curative medications is plausibly more profitable
This may make sense to a layman, but it completely misunderstands how the pharma business works. The vast majority of any research efforts they undertake, no matter what the goal, will crash and burn, some of them very expensively. Obviously the companies decide what to target based on likely profitability, but deciding not to pursue a promising possible cure because it might not make as much money as another promising lead that is merely a long-term palliative is absolutely batshit insane, because they have no idea which one is going to survive clinical trials.
The more general problem, of course, is that curing most diseases outright, and especially cancer, is often extremely difficult to do without killing the host, so it's not like there are many magic "cures" hidden away anyway. A truly comprehensive approach will probably require decades of further advances in biotechnology and our understanding of disease mechanisms before any pharma exec would even think of sinking money into trying to "cure cancer" outright.
In 20 years. . . some asshole corporation will claim to own the genes and therefore any possible treatment.
Aside from the unpatentability of genes in the US, the patent term is less than 20 years anyway.
Now, centuries later, the genetic corruption has festered long enough to surface again in a call to force everyone to submit to the power of those who seek to control the lives of everyone around them.
It hasn't "surfaced", it's been there all along. The only thing that's changed is that in this particular case, it's people you disagree with who are calling for authoritarianism.
Liberty and freedom are more important than you not getting sick.
Your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
Let me put it this way: I have no desire to force a smallpox vaccination into anyone. But I would consider it equally valid self-defense for the rest of us to point guns at willingly unvaccinated individuals and tell them to keep the hell away from us, because carriers for easily communicable and frequently fatal diseases might as well be waving a loaded gun around (especially if you're one of the unlucky few who has a legitimate medical reason for not getting vaccinated).
Schools are another matter: supposed your child shows up one day with the symptoms of smallpox. Should school officials (public or private) be prohibited from sending it home because of the danger to other students, simply because you're paying?
it's fucking insane that people don't get the vaccine when one exists
Personally, I agree with you, but I still don't think we need a law against every kind of behavior I disapprove of.
I apply a more general rule for the "or else" question: if I would not be comfortable personally enforcing a law, I won't support it. I don't have much of a problem with, say, the compulsory smallpox vaccinations that used to occur, since willingly unvaccinated individuals would be putting me in huge danger simply by breathing the same air. (Although in this case, banishment would indeed be an option.) Or for MMR, relatively harmless in comparison to smallpox but still easily transmissible, I have no problem telling the parents of willingly unvaccinated children that their brats are not welcome in public schools. To me, these responses are commensurate with the public health threat of unvaccinated individuals.
To repeat what I said earlier: simply being in the same classroom as a student with HPV does not expose anyone to the disease, therefore there is no justification for requiring vaccination as a condition of attendance. If you think otherwise you must have gone to a very strange school.