I like computers, and air conditioning, and cars, and concrete, and aluminum cans, and cheap plastic bottles.
Add to that: a greatly reduced birth rate (helping stabilize the population), vastly lower infant mortality, and life expectancies in the mid-70s in the developed world (early 80s if you live in one of those horrid north European socialist countries). None of this would have been possible without the huge increase in prosperity and productivity brought by industrialization. People tend to think of gadgets when they think of technology, but even without cars, air conditioning, computers, and disposable packaging, our quality of life is almost incomprehensibly better than it was 200 years ago. (Leaving aside sub-Saharan Africa, among other hellholes, but the solution for that is more technology and economic development, not less.)
I suspect that we've also managed to preserve some parts of our environment much longer than we might have if not for industrialization. Europe was essentially deforested by the late Middle Ages, because they needed all of that wood for fuel and construction, and open land for agriculture. Now that our agricultural production has also been largely industrialized and made far more efficient by chemical fertilizers, we can pack people into concrete-and-metal cities, and we have more advanced fuel sources, we can afford to leave some trees standing. (FYI, there are actually a lot of relatively liberal environmentalists who are adamantly in favor of nuclear power, for obvious reasons. We tend to get shouted out by the Greenpeace types and the ignorant moderates who freak out when the word "nuclear" is mentioned, unfortunately.)
Greens demanding that Western nations reduce CO2 emissions, so we shipped all our factories to China
This is nonsense. "We" shipped all of "our" factories to China because the labor costs are (or were) vastly lower and improvements in global communications and transport made the distance increasingly less problematic. And do you think CO2 is the only thing that China's factories are spilling out? Their pollution is so bad that the life expectancy in some regions is years below what it should be. Of course there are economic costs to any regulation, of pollutants or anything else, but there are countless examples of the damage that industrialization without any regard of the environmental consequences brings. (China probably isn't the worst; try googling "Magnetogorsk".) The US may not have the manufacturing capacity it once did, but our rivers don't catch on fire either.
are you actually that eager to carve up other people into spare parts? Do you want to live in a society that does that?
I must say, I am shocked at the number of people posting here who support China's policy. Is there a sudden flood of postings from Texas high-school students, or something? I haven't seen this much sociopathy on display since someone tried to defend the execution of Islamic apostates a few months ago.
Every time one of these arguments comes up, I end up even more firmly convinced that we should abolish the death penalty without exception. I'd rather let mass murderers die of a ripe old age (in a small, windowless cell without books or TV, of course) than indulge the bloodlust of some of our upstanding citizens.
China's policy *starts* once a prisoner is already on death row... they're genotyped, then kept alive until recipients are found for their organs. The system mostly works well, because it eliminates the rush to perform a transplant on short notice and the dependency on local availability. They can schedule the execution, harvesting, and transplant well in advance, and have everyone in place & ready to go before the prisoner gets executed... The *real* ethical problem
Holy shit, you think the fact that the victims may not actually deserve their fate is the only ethical problem? How about keeping people alive in detention indefinitely with the promise that eventually, one day, they'll be killed for their organs? That's fucking goulish, and far crueler than simply executing them immediately.
So instead, we only have to worry about hospitals purposely letting you die so they can harvest your organs. If you object, please tell me how this can be avoided.
In the US, if a doctor deliberately lets you die so the hospital can harvest your organ, we call that "malpractice" and quite possibly "murder", and there are legal remedies for both of those offenses. In China, if the government executes someone and harvests his organs, it's called "preserving social stability", and there is no legal remedy because the state makes its own rules, and is notorious for locking up people who complain.
It never ceases to amaze me that for all the hardware the human brain possess, we are so bad at many of the tasks we perform. I mean, it's ludicrous to think how the avian or reptilian or cetacean or insect or even other mammalian species can perform advanced calculations in 1/100th the amount of time that it takes a human mind to complete the same damn calculation. I find that deeply troubling. A freaking spider can scan a series of stems, like a mainframe computer, and determine which one is the right one to climb, with a brain less than the size of a pin...and yet a human child, of several years of age, might fail at even understanding the task to be performed, let alone performing the task itself.
Part of evolution involves specialization, and we lose certain instincts or abilities that are unnecessary for maximum fitness. We don't have the speed of a cheetah, or the sense of smell of a bloodhound, or the vision of a falcon either. Instead, we ended up with verbal communication, opposable thumbs, and creativity and intuition beyond anything we've observed so far in the animal world. Seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
I just don't get why so many people are so negative or consider it to be some kind of dream to want to try and improve the world in any way.
Because people grow up and realize that the fantasies they had as a child won't actually become reality, and it makes them bitter. Because they see youthful optimism and exuberance and it makes them more bitter, and the only way they can feel better is to bring a little more despair and anger into everyone else's life. Most of them, growing up, probably had a more idealistic view of the world, and their fellow humans, and were exposed to mythical ideals of the "good old days" (which actually sucked for most people), and as they got older and realized how things actually worked, they became even more convinced of the inevitable decline of their country and civilization in general. A few of them probably read Marx, or Rand, or Chomsky, or Buckley, and became even more convinced of their own rectitude and everyone else's corruption, and find it immensely gratifying to think of themselves as lone, heroic figures whose duty is to warn the rest of us sheeple of our imminent demise. (Needless to say, our reaction only validates their sense of persecution and intellectual superiority.)
I'm a professional scientist, but I have several bookcases full of history that I read for fun, so a) I'm a big fan of technological advancement, and b) I have an excellent idea of how shitty most of human civilization was for all but a tiny handful, and how far we've come. People living today are on average freer, healthier, and more prosperous than at any time in history. Everyone knows there is still much room for improvement, on both a moral and a technological level, but I'm pretty sure the people dreaming about transformative technologies will end up doing far more to make the world a better place than the people who have nothing better to do than whine about how awful everything is.
I don't entirely disagree with some of the naysayers; it still makes my teeth grind every time someone who watched too much "Star Trek" demands that we convert to a command economy so they can have their Mars colonies. And I'm not a fan of our military-industrial complex either. But I'm glad there are people fantasizing about traveling to Mars (and working on making that a reality, minus the massive drain on tax dollars) or finding extrasolar planets, and I'm glad there are people researching brain-computer interfaces, because the world will never get better if everyone spends all day bitching about it on Slashdot. The only part I find frustrating is that things aren't moving faster, because I want to be able to work from the beach and live to 180, goddammit.
Advances in military technology trickle down to civilian life all the time. Radar, computers, jet engines, satellites, the list goes on. (Oh, and the Internet, which I already mentioned below.) Battlefield medicine has made huge advances too, which are applicable to injuries that have nothing to do with warfare. The big area where I think there has been too little transfer is rocketry, where federal regulations severely restrict employment and the availability of technology.
I don't view any of this as an actual justification for military spending - I'm firmly in the camp that believes the US should be like Switzerland with nukes. But it's simply ignorant of history to claim that military research never benefits anyone but the military.
No, it's arguably less corrupt and violent than the governments that funded the early development of DARPA and the Internet. It's unquestionably building fewer weapons of mass destruction, anyway. I realize most of the people posting here weren't even born when the Vietnam war or the Cuban missile crisis or the Nixon administration were happening, but could you try reading some history occasionally?
The main issue, as far as I can see, is that technological advances have made certain types of malfeasance more accessible to those in power. Thus we have vastly more targeted assassinations (drone strikes) and surveillance (NSA) than we did in, say, 1970. On the other hand, in 1970 we were bombing Vietnam (and Cambodia) on a scale vastly more destructive than anything we've done to Iraq or Afghanistan, and Hoover was still in charge of the FBI. I realize that using this as a reference point for evaluating our current government is grading on a curve, but I fail to see how aiding DARPA in 2013 is any worse than aiding it in the development of the Internet.
Sooner or later some evil person is going to figure out a way to biologically/mechanically enhance a human being into a "supersoldier," in a way that will compromise the long term health or well being of he human being.
Or, alternately, some decent person will figure out a way to biologically/mechanically enhance a human being in a way that removes physical disabilities and/or existing physiological limitations, and amplifies intelligence to the point where we can effortlessly accomplish in a day what once took a week or more. It's not just military mad scientists who daydream about brain-computer interfaces and other forms of human enhancement; these technologies have potential far beyond warfare. I know I'm not the only person who has fantasized about what life would be like if I could have instant recall of any information available on the network, while running along 50km of undeveloped coastline. Instead, I'm sitting on in my Aeron in front of the computer, looking out the window as a beautiful day passes by, and wishing I could run for more than five minutes without shooting pains in my legs and lungs. So, honestly, I hope DARPA hurries up with this.
The truth is the US is a country with low upwards mobility, and is totally in denial about it.
Part of the reason for this is that in just about every society across recorded history, the degree of upwards mobility was much worse. We tend not to see this because it's much easier to compare our situation to other modern societies (i.e. European welfare states) or hypothetical utopias than to a past we never experienced. I don't want to idealize the American system, because it does have warts, but even the poor in America have vastly more opportunities (and wealth, and freedom, and political rights) than most people who have ever lived. That doesn't mean that we can't do better, just that a sense of perspective is helpful.
I can think of a dozen better ways to spend that money, but other rich fucks have those already. If he wants to do good, how about paying taxes, reparations for the companies that he destroyed, jail time for the politicians that he bought, etc.
Fine, what are the dozen other better ways to spend the money than trying to cure diseases that afflict millions? Paying taxes instead is simply going to perpetuate our military-industrial complex and bloated entitlement programs. I honestly don't care if Bill Gates is doing this work out of the goodness of his heart or just because he's an egotist; I care about whether it actually does some good. It won't excuse the awful mess that is Microsoft Windows, but if he really does help end malaria, he'll have improved vastly more lives than he ever destroyed (and frankly I'm skeptical that anyone's life was "destroyed" by his business practices; some people simply didn't get rich. boo-hoo.).
Now mod me to oblivion. For some reason Slashdot just can't not drink this cool-aid.
Trite statements like this just make you look like a self-absorbed douche. At least two-thirds of the comments on this story so far are anti-Gates, so you're not exactly speaking truth to power here.
There are plenty of stories of armed homeowners stopping criminals. Each and every one of those would have been a successful crime otherwise, so it's pretty obvious gun ownership has a positive effect.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". This simply can't be repeated often enough.
Sounds insanely inefficient to me. Maybe there needs to be some competition to remove the inefficiencies. i.e. no, or at least highly restricted, patent monopolies.
I think you're missing the fundamental point of patents. If there is no temporary monopoly on a novel drug, what is to prevent a bunch of bottom-feeders from simply copying it and selling it at a tenth of the price? It's far easier to copy someone else than to come up with something genuinely new, especially with a product that's so ridiculously easy to reverse engineer. On the other hand, just because one company has a drug that treats heart disease, does not prevent another company from making an entirely different drug to treat heart disease. (Unless it's one of those sleazy cases like Ariad Pharmaceuticals and their NF-kappaB patent, which basically prevented anyone from developing drugs that altered that pathway. Fortunately, the courts eventually nixed this.)
The pure research is mostly done off of NIH or DOE grants. The only drug-money research is the attempt to add an extra protein here, or swap an atom there to make it patentable, and then get the analogue through human trials,
Drugs discovered using NIH or DOE grants are usually already patentable if they don't fail one of the other tests. But these only account for about 25% of new drugs; the remainder are genuinely discovered by drug companies. That doesn't mean that the drug companies don't benefit in other ways from public research - most of what we know about the mechanisms of disease and the biochemistry of individual proteins comes from academics. But there's a huge leap from "we know this protein causes cancer" to "we have a drug to stop cancer".
In any case, even when academics do find a promising drug, the human trials are usually still vastly more expensive than the basic research. And in many cases there is still a great deal of trial and error necessary to come up with a drug that has the desired functional and pharmacological properties.
Right now the NIH does the early research, but doesn't spend the boatload of money needed to actually test the stuff they come up with. They usually abandon research when it gets to the point where this article is at.
Not really - what actually happens is typically that the universities patent the discovery and license it to a company which performs the development work. Which does have an element of "socialize the risk, privatize the profits", except that the expense of the product development is typically far more than the basic research done with public funding, and the failure rate is dismal. So at least if a drug candidate bombs in clinical trials, most of the money that just got flushed down the toilet belongs to pharma company shareholders or VCs, and not the taxpaying public. The NIH and the universities don't have much incentive to do this themselves, especially if they can be hauled before Congress and asked to account for the money.
I don't say that trial and error does not have some place in science, but everything medical science seems too much based on trying stuff and doing statistics than on understanding things first.
That's because we still understand shockingly little about biological systems - I think around half of human genes remain uncharacterized. This means that even if we can say with certainty that "mutated protein X causes disease Y", and therefore inhibiting the mutant protein is a promising approach to curing the disease, we have no way of knowing what will happen when we introduce our candidate drug into the actual organism. We know some basic rules, e.g. certain chemical structures are more amenable to entering cells than others, and we can make educated guesses, for example protein kinase inhibitors tend to be non-specific, but there is still a huge amount of uncertainty. Eliminating the guesswork will take decades of painfully slow basic research. Should we simply not try to treat these diseases until we can comprehensively model the entire system and predict how drug candidates will work?
trade secrets, which means that the discovery is not made available to all
Which is extraordinarily difficult for drugs, because everyone will simply buy a bunch of their competitors' pills, and figure out exactly what they're made of down to atomic detail. A typical university chemistry lab could do this in a few days. There are some aspects that are more tricky - the exact packaging is sometimes key to getting the drug absorbed by the body at the desired rate, and the chemical synthesis can be messy - but figuring these out is still way cheaper than coming up with your own drug.
Among these is the drug/pharmaceutical industry because only they can afford the R&D needed to make important things happen.
It's less the "R" than the "D". The government spends large amounts on basic research, including some expenses which drug companies, at least individually, can't afford. For instance, the US Department of Energy builds massive X-ray generators called synchrotrons, which are used by biologists to determine the structures of proteins, and drug companies make heavy use of these to investigate drug candidates. A new state-of-the-art synchrotron is around $1 billion. Naturally, drug companies pay the DOE to use these facilities without revealing their data (which is a requirement of use for everyone else). It's a situation that just about everyone is happy with. (Also, more generally, the government funds studies which increase our knowledge and understanding of biological systems, which can inform drug development even though they usually don't magically lead to new therapies.)
What the government can't or doesn't want to spend money on is the laborious process of taking a drug candidate from the lab bench to the consumer. I made a longer post about this above, but the short version is that it typically costs hundreds of millions of dollars. and most drug candidates don't even make it that far. The government would naturally prefer not to spend huge amounts of taxpayer money on projects that have an exceptionally high risk of failure, and academic scientists are reluctant to work on such projects both in general, and without being well-compensated. So the "development" phase is farmed out to companies.
It is an imperfect process, and I think much could be done to improve the system (I am on the record as supporting the repeal of the Bayh-Dole Act), but right now I do not see any magical alternatives. Maybe with another 20 years' improvement in biotechnology and automation we'll do things differently; I certainly hope so.
Don't even bother arguing that profit motivates progress. The overwhelming majority of researchers and engineers are motivated by the joy of success, not crushing the opposition and getting filthy rich.
The problem with drug development is that the huge majority of efforts end in failure, and depending on how far along the pipeline the drugs are, these failures can be painfully expensive. Truth is, it's not really all that difficult or costly to come up with a nanomolar inhibitor for some key regulatory protein involved in heart disease or cancer. But that doesn't mean you've cured the disease. You might synthesize a molecule that completely shuts down your target protein, and start doing in-vivo studies. Here's where the bad shit starts: maybe your compound can't get past the cell membrane. Or maybe it gets shunted to the liver and immediately degraded - unless it fucks up the liver, of course (which one of the major reasons for negative drug interactions, and why many medications have labels saying "do not consume alcohol"). Or let's say it gets to exactly where it needs to be, but it also binds with high affinity to seven other proteins, three of which we know nothing about, and all of these are essential for other processes. So you come in the next morning, and half of your test mice are belly-up, another quarter are bleeding rectally, and the remainder will promptly croak if you feed them Tylenol.
If you're really unlucky, your drug passes the animal models easily, and makes it into clinical trials with actual sick humans. If you're really, really unlucky, you make it all the way to Phase III trials, with thousands of patients, and only then do you discover that either a) your drug doesn't really work as well as it needs to, or b) a large fraction of patients manifest severe side effects over time, or c) both. At this point the cumulative expense of developing this candidate may be hundreds of millions of dollars. And companies fail at this stage all the time; it's always big news when this happens, and their market capitalization takes it in the ass.
Now, I don't feel terribly sympathetic for drug companies as a whole; they do some pretty sleazy shit, and have paid some well-deserved fines for their malfeasance. But I would find it incredibly depressing to sink years of my life (and millions of dollars of investor money) into a promising clinical candidate, only to have it fail just shy of the endpoint. I'm an academic scientist, and this is one of the reasons why I've stayed in academia so long, for all of its faults. I get paid less, but I don't have to devote myself to narrowly-scoped projects which have a depressingly high risk of failure. If I had to start doing drug discovery as part of some newly nationalized research plan, I would leave without hesitation. Sorry, but if you want me to spend my life doing something that mind-numbing and soul-crushing, you'd fucking better pay decently me for it. The overwhelming majority of people who know anything about drug discovery will tell you the same thing.
PS #1: Please, explain how the extraordinary improvement in computer hardware since WWII was encouraged by lack of patents. Another counter-example: genome sequencing technology has become orders of magnitude faster in the last dozen or so years. (No, I'm not arguing that we should patent everything; I'm still against patents on software and gene sequences.)
PS #2: Don't assume that scientists aren't motivated by crushing the opposition. That's part of the joy of success, and while we may not be doing it for the money, our egos are at least as big as everyone else's.
Someone else here reminded me that Manning actually delivered these documents to others, who WERE supposed to try to separate that out. But somebody goofed. So I'm not sure that can honestly be blamed on Manning, who actually did make an effort to expose wrongdoing while not releasing those other things to the public.
That's kind of a huge abdication of responsibility on his part, don't you think? Ultimately Manning was the person responsible for leaking classified information - it was his decision alone, and only he had the necessary access. If he really thought that the public would benefit from some of the material he released, it was his duty to separate it out.
I still think this points to naivete rather than malice, and I certainly don't buy the argument that Manning aided his enemies, which would criminalize just about any action which simply makes the US look bad. But I still find Manning's behavior shockingly irresponsible and somewhat dangerous. If revealing US misdeeds damaged our national interests, that's our problem, not his, and we obviously need to clean up our act. However, there is an awful lot of sensitive information which the government is quite right to keep secret, not because it hides evidence of their perfidy, but because leaking it simply creates messes. Stuff like which foreign nationals are (legally) cooperating with us, which foreign officials are problematic to deal with, what the political situation in a country is like, etc. I'm not convinced that it actually did as much harm as some have suggested - if people really did get killed as a result of the leaks, I'm sure the prosecution would have made a big deal about it - but we simply can't afford to let this kind of irresponsibility go entirely unpunished. Time served, a criminal record, and a dishonorable discharge seem like enough to me, however.
(On the other hand, from what I've read about Edward Snowden, I'd have a difficult time defending his prosecution under any circumstances, although I'm not very impressed that he sought refuge with the PRC and Putin.)
Many of the documents made it very clear that our government was working covertly in ways that were not necessarily in the actual interest of The People of the United States. I applaud those revelations.
I agree, but keep in mind that many of the documents were simply things we didn't want the entire world to know, but didn't actually indicate any wrongdoing. Like the cables in which diplomatic staff characterized the flaws of some of the people we have no choice but to deal with (unless, of course, you believe that the US should not even have diplomatic relations with countries under less-than-ideal government). This is an essential function of their job, and there was no greater purpose to be served by releasing those documents, other than further embarrassing the US government. So while I'm glad Manning released the video of a gunship mowing down civilians, I still think he needs to go to jail for indiscriminately spreading as many secrets as he could get his hands on, even the harmless ones. (20 years seems a little excessive, though.)
Even in college, calling my Professors "Dr. Whatever" was exceptionally rare and I went to an Ivy League school where you'd think they'd insist on their proper titles.
Weird, I always used their titles in class, also at an Ivy, and it wasn't that long ago (less than 15 years). Of course once I started doing research, I figured out after a couple of days that it was okay for a lowly undergrad to address the professor as "Mark". Since I work with mostly PhDs, usually the only time we're addressed as "Dr. So-and-so" is when someone is being sarcastic; I actually get uncomfortable when someone uses the title seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
I like computers, and air conditioning, and cars, and concrete, and aluminum cans, and cheap plastic bottles.
Add to that: a greatly reduced birth rate (helping stabilize the population), vastly lower infant mortality, and life expectancies in the mid-70s in the developed world (early 80s if you live in one of those horrid north European socialist countries). None of this would have been possible without the huge increase in prosperity and productivity brought by industrialization. People tend to think of gadgets when they think of technology, but even without cars, air conditioning, computers, and disposable packaging, our quality of life is almost incomprehensibly better than it was 200 years ago. (Leaving aside sub-Saharan Africa, among other hellholes, but the solution for that is more technology and economic development, not less.)
I suspect that we've also managed to preserve some parts of our environment much longer than we might have if not for industrialization. Europe was essentially deforested by the late Middle Ages, because they needed all of that wood for fuel and construction, and open land for agriculture. Now that our agricultural production has also been largely industrialized and made far more efficient by chemical fertilizers, we can pack people into concrete-and-metal cities, and we have more advanced fuel sources, we can afford to leave some trees standing. (FYI, there are actually a lot of relatively liberal environmentalists who are adamantly in favor of nuclear power, for obvious reasons. We tend to get shouted out by the Greenpeace types and the ignorant moderates who freak out when the word "nuclear" is mentioned, unfortunately.)
Greens demanding that Western nations reduce CO2 emissions, so we shipped all our factories to China
This is nonsense. "We" shipped all of "our" factories to China because the labor costs are (or were) vastly lower and improvements in global communications and transport made the distance increasingly less problematic. And do you think CO2 is the only thing that China's factories are spilling out? Their pollution is so bad that the life expectancy in some regions is years below what it should be. Of course there are economic costs to any regulation, of pollutants or anything else, but there are countless examples of the damage that industrialization without any regard of the environmental consequences brings. (China probably isn't the worst; try googling "Magnetogorsk".) The US may not have the manufacturing capacity it once did, but our rivers don't catch on fire either.
are you actually that eager to carve up other people into spare parts? Do you want to live in a society that does that?
I must say, I am shocked at the number of people posting here who support China's policy. Is there a sudden flood of postings from Texas high-school students, or something? I haven't seen this much sociopathy on display since someone tried to defend the execution of Islamic apostates a few months ago.
Every time one of these arguments comes up, I end up even more firmly convinced that we should abolish the death penalty without exception. I'd rather let mass murderers die of a ripe old age (in a small, windowless cell without books or TV, of course) than indulge the bloodlust of some of our upstanding citizens.
China's policy *starts* once a prisoner is already on death row... they're genotyped, then kept alive until recipients are found for their organs. The system mostly works well, because it eliminates the rush to perform a transplant on short notice and the dependency on local availability. They can schedule the execution, harvesting, and transplant well in advance, and have everyone in place & ready to go before the prisoner gets executed... The *real* ethical problem
Holy shit, you think the fact that the victims may not actually deserve their fate is the only ethical problem? How about keeping people alive in detention indefinitely with the promise that eventually, one day, they'll be killed for their organs? That's fucking goulish, and far crueler than simply executing them immediately.
So instead, we only have to worry about hospitals purposely letting you die so they can harvest your organs. If you object, please tell me how this can be avoided.
In the US, if a doctor deliberately lets you die so the hospital can harvest your organ, we call that "malpractice" and quite possibly "murder", and there are legal remedies for both of those offenses. In China, if the government executes someone and harvests his organs, it's called "preserving social stability", and there is no legal remedy because the state makes its own rules, and is notorious for locking up people who complain.
It never ceases to amaze me that for all the hardware the human brain possess, we are so bad at many of the tasks we perform. I mean, it's ludicrous to think how the avian or reptilian or cetacean or insect or even other mammalian species can perform advanced calculations in 1/100th the amount of time that it takes a human mind to complete the same damn calculation. I find that deeply troubling. A freaking spider can scan a series of stems, like a mainframe computer, and determine which one is the right one to climb, with a brain less than the size of a pin...and yet a human child, of several years of age, might fail at even understanding the task to be performed, let alone performing the task itself.
Part of evolution involves specialization, and we lose certain instincts or abilities that are unnecessary for maximum fitness. We don't have the speed of a cheetah, or the sense of smell of a bloodhound, or the vision of a falcon either. Instead, we ended up with verbal communication, opposable thumbs, and creativity and intuition beyond anything we've observed so far in the animal world. Seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
I just don't get why so many people are so negative or consider it to be some kind of dream to want to try and improve the world in any way.
Because people grow up and realize that the fantasies they had as a child won't actually become reality, and it makes them bitter. Because they see youthful optimism and exuberance and it makes them more bitter, and the only way they can feel better is to bring a little more despair and anger into everyone else's life. Most of them, growing up, probably had a more idealistic view of the world, and their fellow humans, and were exposed to mythical ideals of the "good old days" (which actually sucked for most people), and as they got older and realized how things actually worked, they became even more convinced of the inevitable decline of their country and civilization in general. A few of them probably read Marx, or Rand, or Chomsky, or Buckley, and became even more convinced of their own rectitude and everyone else's corruption, and find it immensely gratifying to think of themselves as lone, heroic figures whose duty is to warn the rest of us sheeple of our imminent demise. (Needless to say, our reaction only validates their sense of persecution and intellectual superiority.)
I'm a professional scientist, but I have several bookcases full of history that I read for fun, so a) I'm a big fan of technological advancement, and b) I have an excellent idea of how shitty most of human civilization was for all but a tiny handful, and how far we've come. People living today are on average freer, healthier, and more prosperous than at any time in history. Everyone knows there is still much room for improvement, on both a moral and a technological level, but I'm pretty sure the people dreaming about transformative technologies will end up doing far more to make the world a better place than the people who have nothing better to do than whine about how awful everything is.
I don't entirely disagree with some of the naysayers; it still makes my teeth grind every time someone who watched too much "Star Trek" demands that we convert to a command economy so they can have their Mars colonies. And I'm not a fan of our military-industrial complex either. But I'm glad there are people fantasizing about traveling to Mars (and working on making that a reality, minus the massive drain on tax dollars) or finding extrasolar planets, and I'm glad there are people researching brain-computer interfaces, because the world will never get better if everyone spends all day bitching about it on Slashdot. The only part I find frustrating is that things aren't moving faster, because I want to be able to work from the beach and live to 180, goddammit.
Advances in military technology trickle down to civilian life all the time. Radar, computers, jet engines, satellites, the list goes on. (Oh, and the Internet, which I already mentioned below.) Battlefield medicine has made huge advances too, which are applicable to injuries that have nothing to do with warfare. The big area where I think there has been too little transfer is rocketry, where federal regulations severely restrict employment and the availability of technology.
I don't view any of this as an actual justification for military spending - I'm firmly in the camp that believes the US should be like Switzerland with nukes. But it's simply ignorant of history to claim that military research never benefits anyone but the military.
nor is today's government the same as the pasts
No, it's arguably less corrupt and violent than the governments that funded the early development of DARPA and the Internet. It's unquestionably building fewer weapons of mass destruction, anyway. I realize most of the people posting here weren't even born when the Vietnam war or the Cuban missile crisis or the Nixon administration were happening, but could you try reading some history occasionally?
The main issue, as far as I can see, is that technological advances have made certain types of malfeasance more accessible to those in power. Thus we have vastly more targeted assassinations (drone strikes) and surveillance (NSA) than we did in, say, 1970. On the other hand, in 1970 we were bombing Vietnam (and Cambodia) on a scale vastly more destructive than anything we've done to Iraq or Afghanistan, and Hoover was still in charge of the FBI. I realize that using this as a reference point for evaluating our current government is grading on a curve, but I fail to see how aiding DARPA in 2013 is any worse than aiding it in the development of the Internet.
It has become pretty obvious that doing anything to help out DARPA is just going to be used against all of us, one way or another.
Yeah, it really sucks how the Internet has made commerce easier, information more accessible, and governments more transparent. Damn you, DARPA!
Sooner or later some evil person is going to figure out a way to biologically/mechanically enhance a human being into a "supersoldier," in a way that will compromise the long term health or well being of he human being.
Or, alternately, some decent person will figure out a way to biologically/mechanically enhance a human being in a way that removes physical disabilities and/or existing physiological limitations, and amplifies intelligence to the point where we can effortlessly accomplish in a day what once took a week or more. It's not just military mad scientists who daydream about brain-computer interfaces and other forms of human enhancement; these technologies have potential far beyond warfare. I know I'm not the only person who has fantasized about what life would be like if I could have instant recall of any information available on the network, while running along 50km of undeveloped coastline. Instead, I'm sitting on in my Aeron in front of the computer, looking out the window as a beautiful day passes by, and wishing I could run for more than five minutes without shooting pains in my legs and lungs. So, honestly, I hope DARPA hurries up with this.
The truth is the US is a country with low upwards mobility, and is totally in denial about it.
Part of the reason for this is that in just about every society across recorded history, the degree of upwards mobility was much worse. We tend not to see this because it's much easier to compare our situation to other modern societies (i.e. European welfare states) or hypothetical utopias than to a past we never experienced. I don't want to idealize the American system, because it does have warts, but even the poor in America have vastly more opportunities (and wealth, and freedom, and political rights) than most people who have ever lived. That doesn't mean that we can't do better, just that a sense of perspective is helpful.
I can think of a dozen better ways to spend that money, but other rich fucks have those already. If he wants to do good, how about paying taxes, reparations for the companies that he destroyed, jail time for the politicians that he bought, etc.
Fine, what are the dozen other better ways to spend the money than trying to cure diseases that afflict millions? Paying taxes instead is simply going to perpetuate our military-industrial complex and bloated entitlement programs. I honestly don't care if Bill Gates is doing this work out of the goodness of his heart or just because he's an egotist; I care about whether it actually does some good. It won't excuse the awful mess that is Microsoft Windows, but if he really does help end malaria, he'll have improved vastly more lives than he ever destroyed (and frankly I'm skeptical that anyone's life was "destroyed" by his business practices; some people simply didn't get rich. boo-hoo.).
Now mod me to oblivion. For some reason Slashdot just can't not drink this cool-aid.
Trite statements like this just make you look like a self-absorbed douche. At least two-thirds of the comments on this story so far are anti-Gates, so you're not exactly speaking truth to power here.
There are plenty of stories of armed homeowners stopping criminals. Each and every one of those would have been a successful crime otherwise, so it's pretty obvious gun ownership has a positive effect.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". This simply can't be repeated often enough.
The amusing thing is that the increase of bullets (i.e. people owning guns) has also contributed to drops in crime rates...
Actually, violent crime in the United States has dropped significantly since the 1980s and early 1990s, but so has gun ownership.
Sounds insanely inefficient to me. Maybe there needs to be some competition to remove the inefficiencies. i.e. no, or at least highly restricted, patent monopolies.
I think you're missing the fundamental point of patents. If there is no temporary monopoly on a novel drug, what is to prevent a bunch of bottom-feeders from simply copying it and selling it at a tenth of the price? It's far easier to copy someone else than to come up with something genuinely new, especially with a product that's so ridiculously easy to reverse engineer. On the other hand, just because one company has a drug that treats heart disease, does not prevent another company from making an entirely different drug to treat heart disease. (Unless it's one of those sleazy cases like Ariad Pharmaceuticals and their NF-kappaB patent, which basically prevented anyone from developing drugs that altered that pathway. Fortunately, the courts eventually nixed this.)
The pure research is mostly done off of NIH or DOE grants. The only drug-money research is the attempt to add an extra protein here, or swap an atom there to make it patentable, and then get the analogue through human trials,
Drugs discovered using NIH or DOE grants are usually already patentable if they don't fail one of the other tests. But these only account for about 25% of new drugs; the remainder are genuinely discovered by drug companies. That doesn't mean that the drug companies don't benefit in other ways from public research - most of what we know about the mechanisms of disease and the biochemistry of individual proteins comes from academics. But there's a huge leap from "we know this protein causes cancer" to "we have a drug to stop cancer".
In any case, even when academics do find a promising drug, the human trials are usually still vastly more expensive than the basic research. And in many cases there is still a great deal of trial and error necessary to come up with a drug that has the desired functional and pharmacological properties.
Right now the NIH does the early research, but doesn't spend the boatload of money needed to actually test the stuff they come up with. They usually abandon research when it gets to the point where this article is at.
Not really - what actually happens is typically that the universities patent the discovery and license it to a company which performs the development work. Which does have an element of "socialize the risk, privatize the profits", except that the expense of the product development is typically far more than the basic research done with public funding, and the failure rate is dismal. So at least if a drug candidate bombs in clinical trials, most of the money that just got flushed down the toilet belongs to pharma company shareholders or VCs, and not the taxpaying public. The NIH and the universities don't have much incentive to do this themselves, especially if they can be hauled before Congress and asked to account for the money.
I don't say that trial and error does not have some place in science, but everything medical science seems too much based on trying stuff and doing statistics than on understanding things first.
That's because we still understand shockingly little about biological systems - I think around half of human genes remain uncharacterized. This means that even if we can say with certainty that "mutated protein X causes disease Y", and therefore inhibiting the mutant protein is a promising approach to curing the disease, we have no way of knowing what will happen when we introduce our candidate drug into the actual organism. We know some basic rules, e.g. certain chemical structures are more amenable to entering cells than others, and we can make educated guesses, for example protein kinase inhibitors tend to be non-specific, but there is still a huge amount of uncertainty. Eliminating the guesswork will take decades of painfully slow basic research. Should we simply not try to treat these diseases until we can comprehensively model the entire system and predict how drug candidates will work?
trade secrets, which means that the discovery is not made available to all
Which is extraordinarily difficult for drugs, because everyone will simply buy a bunch of their competitors' pills, and figure out exactly what they're made of down to atomic detail. A typical university chemistry lab could do this in a few days. There are some aspects that are more tricky - the exact packaging is sometimes key to getting the drug absorbed by the body at the desired rate, and the chemical synthesis can be messy - but figuring these out is still way cheaper than coming up with your own drug.
Among these is the drug/pharmaceutical industry because only they can afford the R&D needed to make important things happen.
It's less the "R" than the "D". The government spends large amounts on basic research, including some expenses which drug companies, at least individually, can't afford. For instance, the US Department of Energy builds massive X-ray generators called synchrotrons, which are used by biologists to determine the structures of proteins, and drug companies make heavy use of these to investigate drug candidates. A new state-of-the-art synchrotron is around $1 billion. Naturally, drug companies pay the DOE to use these facilities without revealing their data (which is a requirement of use for everyone else). It's a situation that just about everyone is happy with. (Also, more generally, the government funds studies which increase our knowledge and understanding of biological systems, which can inform drug development even though they usually don't magically lead to new therapies.)
What the government can't or doesn't want to spend money on is the laborious process of taking a drug candidate from the lab bench to the consumer. I made a longer post about this above, but the short version is that it typically costs hundreds of millions of dollars. and most drug candidates don't even make it that far. The government would naturally prefer not to spend huge amounts of taxpayer money on projects that have an exceptionally high risk of failure, and academic scientists are reluctant to work on such projects both in general, and without being well-compensated. So the "development" phase is farmed out to companies.
It is an imperfect process, and I think much could be done to improve the system (I am on the record as supporting the repeal of the Bayh-Dole Act), but right now I do not see any magical alternatives. Maybe with another 20 years' improvement in biotechnology and automation we'll do things differently; I certainly hope so.
Don't even bother arguing that profit motivates progress. The overwhelming majority of researchers and engineers are motivated by the joy of success, not crushing the opposition and getting filthy rich.
The problem with drug development is that the huge majority of efforts end in failure, and depending on how far along the pipeline the drugs are, these failures can be painfully expensive. Truth is, it's not really all that difficult or costly to come up with a nanomolar inhibitor for some key regulatory protein involved in heart disease or cancer. But that doesn't mean you've cured the disease. You might synthesize a molecule that completely shuts down your target protein, and start doing in-vivo studies. Here's where the bad shit starts: maybe your compound can't get past the cell membrane. Or maybe it gets shunted to the liver and immediately degraded - unless it fucks up the liver, of course (which one of the major reasons for negative drug interactions, and why many medications have labels saying "do not consume alcohol"). Or let's say it gets to exactly where it needs to be, but it also binds with high affinity to seven other proteins, three of which we know nothing about, and all of these are essential for other processes. So you come in the next morning, and half of your test mice are belly-up, another quarter are bleeding rectally, and the remainder will promptly croak if you feed them Tylenol.
If you're really unlucky, your drug passes the animal models easily, and makes it into clinical trials with actual sick humans. If you're really, really unlucky, you make it all the way to Phase III trials, with thousands of patients, and only then do you discover that either a) your drug doesn't really work as well as it needs to, or b) a large fraction of patients manifest severe side effects over time, or c) both. At this point the cumulative expense of developing this candidate may be hundreds of millions of dollars. And companies fail at this stage all the time; it's always big news when this happens, and their market capitalization takes it in the ass.
Now, I don't feel terribly sympathetic for drug companies as a whole; they do some pretty sleazy shit, and have paid some well-deserved fines for their malfeasance. But I would find it incredibly depressing to sink years of my life (and millions of dollars of investor money) into a promising clinical candidate, only to have it fail just shy of the endpoint. I'm an academic scientist, and this is one of the reasons why I've stayed in academia so long, for all of its faults. I get paid less, but I don't have to devote myself to narrowly-scoped projects which have a depressingly high risk of failure. If I had to start doing drug discovery as part of some newly nationalized research plan, I would leave without hesitation. Sorry, but if you want me to spend my life doing something that mind-numbing and soul-crushing, you'd fucking better pay decently me for it. The overwhelming majority of people who know anything about drug discovery will tell you the same thing.
PS #1: Please, explain how the extraordinary improvement in computer hardware since WWII was encouraged by lack of patents. Another counter-example: genome sequencing technology has become orders of magnitude faster in the last dozen or so years. (No, I'm not arguing that we should patent everything; I'm still against patents on software and gene sequences.)
PS #2: Don't assume that scientists aren't motivated by crushing the opposition. That's part of the joy of success, and while we may not be doing it for the money, our egos are at least as big as everyone else's.
Someone else here reminded me that Manning actually delivered these documents to others, who WERE supposed to try to separate that out. But somebody goofed. So I'm not sure that can honestly be blamed on Manning, who actually did make an effort to expose wrongdoing while not releasing those other things to the public.
That's kind of a huge abdication of responsibility on his part, don't you think? Ultimately Manning was the person responsible for leaking classified information - it was his decision alone, and only he had the necessary access. If he really thought that the public would benefit from some of the material he released, it was his duty to separate it out.
I still think this points to naivete rather than malice, and I certainly don't buy the argument that Manning aided his enemies, which would criminalize just about any action which simply makes the US look bad. But I still find Manning's behavior shockingly irresponsible and somewhat dangerous. If revealing US misdeeds damaged our national interests, that's our problem, not his, and we obviously need to clean up our act. However, there is an awful lot of sensitive information which the government is quite right to keep secret, not because it hides evidence of their perfidy, but because leaking it simply creates messes. Stuff like which foreign nationals are (legally) cooperating with us, which foreign officials are problematic to deal with, what the political situation in a country is like, etc. I'm not convinced that it actually did as much harm as some have suggested - if people really did get killed as a result of the leaks, I'm sure the prosecution would have made a big deal about it - but we simply can't afford to let this kind of irresponsibility go entirely unpunished. Time served, a criminal record, and a dishonorable discharge seem like enough to me, however.
(On the other hand, from what I've read about Edward Snowden, I'd have a difficult time defending his prosecution under any circumstances, although I'm not very impressed that he sought refuge with the PRC and Putin.)
Many of the documents made it very clear that our government was working covertly in ways that were not necessarily in the actual interest of The People of the United States. I applaud those revelations.
I agree, but keep in mind that many of the documents were simply things we didn't want the entire world to know, but didn't actually indicate any wrongdoing. Like the cables in which diplomatic staff characterized the flaws of some of the people we have no choice but to deal with (unless, of course, you believe that the US should not even have diplomatic relations with countries under less-than-ideal government). This is an essential function of their job, and there was no greater purpose to be served by releasing those documents, other than further embarrassing the US government. So while I'm glad Manning released the video of a gunship mowing down civilians, I still think he needs to go to jail for indiscriminately spreading as many secrets as he could get his hands on, even the harmless ones. (20 years seems a little excessive, though.)
Even in college, calling my Professors "Dr. Whatever" was exceptionally rare and I went to an Ivy League school where you'd think they'd insist on their proper titles.
Weird, I always used their titles in class, also at an Ivy, and it wasn't that long ago (less than 15 years). Of course once I started doing research, I figured out after a couple of days that it was okay for a lowly undergrad to address the professor as "Mark". Since I work with mostly PhDs, usually the only time we're addressed as "Dr. So-and-so" is when someone is being sarcastic; I actually get uncomfortable when someone uses the title seriously.