The whole thing reaks of corruption. And it would be totally unnecessary if NIH licensed its research to anyone free of charge, enabling competition on the quality of the execution of the drug.
In which case Bristol-Meyers would have made even more money. Of course, the NIH could try to reserve all patents to itself, and license the drug widely and cheaply, but then who would do the extensive clinical safety testing required to bring a drug to market? Not NIH; they don't have the budget, and in the current political climate, they aren't likely to get it. We need those tax dollars for the perpetual war on terror. Not the generic drug makers, either. Their profit margins are so slim that they can't afford to do that kind of research--their business model is based on waiting until somebody else has done all of those expensive safety studies.
After all NIH's role is research. And by doing so, the drug would not cost the public further 5 billion that went to the fucking Bristol-Meyers (they made 2 billion profit!). Instead 20 generic makers would make it for 1/100th the cost and sold at 1/100th the price. NIH's mission is to help US citizens to get healthy.
More likely, nobody would be making it at all. The generic drug makers wouldn't be able to afford the safety and efficacy testing, and the big pharmaceutical houses wouldn't want to make such a big investment when the profit potential is so slight. They'd choose instead to invest their money in developing another drug that does the same thing, but for which they can retain all of the rights. Result: drugs are just as expensive, but they take a lot longer to get to market. This isn't just extrapolation; this is what used to happen before restrictions on licensing discoveries to industry were liberalized.
Actually they go there to get filthy rich. If pursuit of knowledge was their thing, they would take a grant and publish the results like any other scientist.
Yeah, filthy rich. You seem very ready to presume that if somebody wants a higher salary, they must be greedy. We had an excellent postdoc who left to work in industry because they could afford to pay him enough to afford to care for his disabled child. If your work is of interest to industry, why not pursue it in that context? With fewer commitments to teaching, administration, and grant-writing, you have more time to focus on research. And you can still publish your results--many drug-discovery firms encourage publication, and some even demand it.
You must be kidding... oh wait.. you mean succesful at protecting the "brand name" companies from themselves, the public and from any competition? Claiming Canadian generics are "unsafe"? Demanding massive amounts of paperwork to prevent entry of cheaper alternatives into marketplace? Hiding evidence of side-effects when a "brand" is threatened? Yes they do fine job indeed for their masters.
No, I mean fairly successful in balancing the demands of protecting the public against the demands of patients for new drugs when the old ones don't work well enough. Look into the history of patent medicines before the FDA--or for that matter, recent problems with ephedrine-containing "diet supplements" exempted from FDA scrutiny. I don't agree that Canadian drugs are unsafe (the issue, by the way, is patented drugs sold more cheaply, not "generics"), but I can understand why the FDA, which is charged with protecting the American public, is reluctant to rubber-stamp drugs that have not been subjected to their quality-control system. Can you document any case of the FDA concealing side-effects?
The fact that you claim that perfectly functional, slightly inferior product makes no money is dead giveway that these people are crooks of the highest order.
Keep in mind that where a drug is concerned, "slightly inferior" can mean less likely to save your life and more likely to kill you (or at least make you miserably ill). Is it really any surprise that patients prefer to take the "slightly superior" drug if they have any choice?
If they were humanitarians you claim them to be, or even plain businessmen, they would market the older version to people who cant afford the "new and improved" one, but instead they'd rather have it made illegal to prevent the suckers
I don't know of any case where an older drug has been made "illegal" in the absence of any serious toxicity problem. Older drugs are indeed sold more cheaply--you have to cut the price to sell a product against a superior competitor.
Dude, you should scroll back to the news story that started this whole conversation. Something about "public funding" for "private patent"?
Read it more carefully. The public funding was actually granted to public institutions like universities and the NIH. The drug, Taxol, was subsequently licensed by Bristol-Meyers. The GAO thought that the NIH underpriced it. I have a lot of respect for the GAO, so they may well be right. But restrospective assessments of the value of risky investments are notoriously difficult.
If an investment has the potential to yield a 20% profit, but had only a 20% chance of succeeding, then what you are willing to pay for that investment has to be calculated on the basis of a 5% rate of return. When Bristol-Meyers licensed the compound, the clinical trials were not even finished. That means that the compound still could have failed to be useful. Bristol-Meyers still had to make the investment in making Taxol in large quantities. So Bristol-Meyers could have taken a huge bath on the deal. The question is whether anybody would have been willing to pay more for the license at the time. And keep in mind that any delay in development would have meant more people dead from cancer.
Oh, yes I do, I am having it both ways. If all the resources of private enterpises are put into one reasearch line, that in one fell swoop achieves both: removes top talent from the other lines of inquiry and makes most of the facilities unavailable for other research, plus leaves everybody else scrambling for remaining scraps.
Nope. That's the thing about the top people--they don't necessarily go where the money is, because they are interested in what they are interested in. The top people I know who went into industry didn't go there because they were looking for more money--they went them there because the science that interested them happened to lead them in a direction that was of interest to pharmaceutical companies. Neither are facilities limiting. Get a grant, and you can build yourself a facility. The fact that a pharmaceutical company builds a research facility doesn't prevent me from building one.
FDA exists as a feeble attempt to control abuses by the very drug companies you defend.
And for the most part, they are fairly successful. In fact, pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars generating the data that the FDA demands, and that is one factor in the high cost of drug development that has made it virtually inaccessible to anybody outside "Big Pharma".
Err.. wait, how do drugs get "obsolete"? They stop working? Perheaps some anti-biotics do, but other types? A new, improved one is made, sure, but how many old ones cease to function? You know it is not like a "fashion" trend is present in drug use. Noone gets new "seasonal styles" or a color to match one's dress.
Drugs get obsolete when other, better drugs become available--drugs that have a better chance of helping the patient and a lower risk of hurting him. Or that patients prefer because they have better pharmacokinetics, so that they can take their medication on a more reasonable schedule. And a perfectly good drug may cease to be profitable simply because it goes out of patent. Often, by the time a drug gets approved by the FDA, the patent only has a few years to run. Sure, Lord of the Rings is going to be a great movie 10 years from now, but it isn't going to be making enough money to keep a studio in business. A studio needs to make new movies to survive. Similarly, drug companies require new discoveries to survive.
Oh yes, that justifies all. We should all gamble public funds in corporate roulettes in hopes that some useful side-effects occur and when a windfall is made, the corporation naturally keeps the benefits. Rather then funding academic research and making corporations compete on manufacturing and delivery.
No, the public funds go to nonprofit institutions such as universities, not to pharmaceutical companies. The way that research gets to pharmaceutical companies is either by reading the literature (for example, the research of academic researchers such as Furchgott whose basic science discoveries led to Viagra), or by licensing patented inventions from the universities. The universities then take the royalties and use those to fund additional basic science research.
Except that funding comes only of you do research in easilly marketable, high-profit drugs. You dont want to? No funding. That is how everyone is doing Viagras and other "lifestyle" drugs.
You can't have it both ways. First you were arguing that money for research on Viagra like drugs makes working on them so attractive that it will pull people away from other lines of research, now you are complaining that people won't want to do that kind of research. The people who don't want to work on marketable drugs can do publicly (or foundation) fundable research just the way they do today. The ones who want a little more money, or who just happen to be interested in the basic science that underlies a marketable drug, can work for the drug companies.
I cant believe this is coming from someone in academia. As someone in business, let me tell you how it works: making more money, means more profit. Thats it. That is the entire point of the operation. If investing in marketing produces more profit, so it is done. If one can make a fake "drug" whereby the main ingredient is sugar and salt, and the "research" was conducted by someone else and the manufacturing can be done by a set of rented monkeys, plus the "drug" has highly-addictive properties, that constitutes a most desirable and optimal situation.
Yes, there are companies that work that way--they mainly sell "natural herbal diet supplements" that allow them to avoid the scrutiny of the FDA. It's probably a more reliable route to riches than doing drug discovery. But in the pharmaceutical industry, making a real drug that actually helps people turns out to be the only sure strategy for keeping those profits going. The pharmaceutical research directors I've met aren't scam artists; they're scientists who are primarily interested in making discoveries and helping people, and who are happy to have managed to find a way to do that and make a good living at the same time. That just turns out to be the kind of guy who is best at doing the sort of research that makes big profits for pharmaceutical companies
Marketing won't keep those profits coming year to year, because patents run out and competitors appear, and eventually no amount of marketing will sell an obsolete drug. So the only way for a drug company to maintain profitability is to keep making discoveries. And because marketing brings in more money than it costs, it helps to provide the cash flow that is necessary to do that research. If pharmaceutical companies stopped marketing their products, they would have less money to invest in research, not more.
That is merely a lucky fluke. If Viagra produced nothing of the sort, it would still receive the attention it did.
Undoubtedly. But it turns out to be the rule rather than the exception, because in biology, everything is connected. So there is no way to direct your research only toward profitable drugs, because you don't know which information is useful for that purpose, and which is useful for other things, until you have it. It works the other way, too. The original line of research that ultimately led to Viagra wasn't directed toward making a profitable drug. It all came out of Bob Furchgott's work, and he wasn't trying to make a drug at all. He was trying to answer a basic science question in pharmacology: how does acetylcholine dilate blood vessels?
So far I've increased my collection by 52 movies in the last month, at about 90 cents each (DVD+R + jewel case + prorated Movie Pass)
The problem with maintaining a collection like this is that it takes up valuable space, not to mention time. Kids may watch a movie 50 times, but I don't. If could get a video reliably and quickly over the net when I wanted to see it, I'd pay a few bucks per download just so I wouldn't have to bother shelving them.
As for the $300 package, $300 would buy me five years worth of TWC DVR service. I find it highly unlikely anyone will *really* be using that 5 year old modded TiVo at that point. Maybe some people would, but I'm usually much faster on the electronics upgrade cycle than that.
I wouldn't think the business model would be the stand-alone TiVo. It would probably be more like the DirecTiVo, currently available for free to new customers from many installers, with an additional programming cost of $5/month (which covers any number of DirecTiVo units in the house). In a year or two, they'll probably be offering the same deal for the High Definition TiVo.
This sounds great (I have both a Tivo and Netflix subscription) but I'm worried about the sound quality coming out of the Tivo. Right now, the Tivo doesn't support multi-channel output so I think the best movies via the Tivo could do would be Stereo sounds.:( Is this the case?
The new High Definition TiVos support multichannel output. At the moment, that system is still priced for the videophile market ($1000), but in a couple of years they'll probably be handing it out for $100 with a couple of months free rentals included.
Being able to download DVDs to my TiVo is something I'd probably do occasionally when the video shop a couple of blocks from my home doesn't have what I want. On the other hand, if I could download better-than-DVDs to my high-definition TiVo, I'd probably go to my TiVo first, and check the video store if TiVo couldn't get it.
You are quite naive, Sir. There is a finite amount of reserch facilities and personell available, not to mention top scientific talent. If you put them to work on viagras of the world, very few remain to do anything else.
Speaking as research pharmacologist who sits on the admissions committee of an academic Pharmacology Dept., this is nonsense. We are nowhere close to depleting the worldwide reserves of talented people interested in doing biomedical research. If you fund it, they will come.
You mean in marketing? Yes, Pfizer does research but its research budget is but a fraction of its marketing budget. Just like most drug companies. The point is that Pfizer and the rest of them are ill equipped and have too many conflicts of interest to be allowed to be in charge of such critical thing like medical research.
Think about this for a moment. Do you really imagine that companies invest in marketing to throw money away? Marketing makes money, by increasing sales. That's why they do it. More sales means more money to invest in research.
It is not frivolous for what it cures. It is frivolous for the amount of resources (from Pfizer and all the competitors in mad rush to replicate something like it) that it consumes when compared to the severity of the ills that it addresses. It is an example of profit motive being superior to anything else.
No, it is an example of the profit motive leading people to serve the public interest in spite of themselves. Because the fundamental vascular and biochemical mechanisms that make Viagra work turn out to be critical for understanding things like heart disease and stroke .
There would be less frivolous drugs (viagra?) which consume bulk of the private research funds. Instead there would be publically founded research (which apparently is already done) coupled with a large array of generic drug makers, competing on manufacuring quality and price.
This is nonsense. A drug such as Viagra doesn't "consume" private research funds. Viagra makes money for Pfizer, who can then invest the profits in other research projects. And it is worth noting that the basic science behind Viagra is also relevant to finding treatments for less "frivolous" (although I wouldn't use that word to anybody actually suffering from erectile disfunction) ailments.
However, scientific research is only of benefit to all if all the parties involved share the results of their work with each other, freely and without restriction. You can bet your boots that China will not share the results of any valuable lines of investigation with us, but they are perfectly happy to take what we make available for free.
US scientists share their research by publishing it in publicly available (albeit generally not free as in beer) journals because it is the sharing of information that has enables rapid scientific progress. They also do so because such published research effectively functions as an advertisement for their capabilities, and helps them to negotiate better jobs and obtain better grants. Scientists in other countries that have strong research efforts do the same. It's not a matter of being "open to foreign powers;" it's just the only way of doing science that works.
Even many private companies publish their work, once the patents are filed. They are not obliged to do so, but they find that participation in the scientific publication process increases the quality of their internal research.
hopefully this will help filter out bogus research by opening it up to more eyes.
Probably not. Most of the people who know enough about a field to usefully critique this kind of highly technical paper already have access to a university library.
Also, people have been a little miffed by some design choices. Why have all the wires running out the back of the screen instead of the base (I know, I know, wireless keyboard and mouse -- but most people will be hooking a printer up to this thing).
That can also be done wirelessly with Airport Express.
That's why such experiments are published in peer-review journals rather than the general media. That way if someone has problems repelicating an experiment they can work throught them with the original experimenters, before the general public ever gets involved.
Yeah, right. Do you really imagine that the reviewers try to replicate the result? Typically, you get the paper from the journal and you have maybe a couple of weeks to evaluate it. The journal doesn't send you any money to replicate the experiments, and you probably aren't funded to do it on your existing grants. Papers don't get rejected because somebody tried to replicate it and failed--they get rejected because something isn't adequately explained, or the conclusions don't follow from the results, or the data is not of sufficient quality, or it just isn't exciting enough to meet the journal's standards.
The reality is that it is commonplace to try to replicate something that has been published in the peer-reviewed literature and fail. Often, you futz with the procedure a while and get it to work with slightly different conditions. Sometimes it just starts working once you get a little practice, and you aren't quite sure why. And most of the time, you don't spend a lot of time trying to figure it out--you're probably trying to do something else, anyway since simply replicating somebody else's work (or worse, failing to replicate it) won't get you published. And 99.9% of the time figuring out the details of this kind of problem doesn't lead anywhere interesting. Of course, there is that other 0.1% -- Bob Furchgott took the trouble to figure out why acetylcholine relaxed vascular smooth muscle for one technician and not for another, and it led to a Nobel Prize (and Viagra).
If you can't describe the environment in which an experiment can be reproduced reliably, you don't understand the phenominon properly enough to be calling press conferences.
Unfortunately, the first clue that this is the case is often when somebody else tries to reproduce the phenomenon and fails. You describe everything about the conditions that seems potentially relevant, but you have to draw the line at some point. Anybody who has ever tried to debug a difficult-to-reproduce phenomenon knows how difficult can be. It works perfectly for one guy, and another guy who seems to be doing essentially the same thing gets a different result. The uncontrolled factor often turns out to be something that nobody even imagined would be important.
Oh god... how many times do we have to hear this stupid argument????? The fact is, the price point of these players does not make sense from a logical point of view. I know that people are dumb, so they buy at strange price points, but this does not make the pricing of the mini or this thing a good thing.
From a logical point of view, the price should be a good match to the value of the item to the prospective buyer. Judging by Apple's profits, they did a very good job of matching price to value. Perhaps Apple simply took the trouble to understand what people actually like, instead of trying to dictate what they should like and dismissing anybody with different preferences as "dumb."
This is fallacious reasoning. Would you buy a keyboard that had a wheel instead of buttons?
No. Wheels are much better than buttons for some things--scrolling through a list of a large number of items or inputting continuous or near-continuous quantities--but buttons have the advantage for random-access selection from a small, fixed list. It's simply a matter of the right tool for the job.
It's not just in your mind. Wicca just doesn't feature Satan as a character.
No, Wicca is a modern recreation of pre-Christian pagan belief. Satanism is a Christian heresy--it accepts the Christian supernatural entities, but differs in the form of devotion.
Also, the author of Harry Potter is a proponent of wicca.
I can't see why this sort of ad hominem should be relevant. Would the books be more acceptable if she were Christian, like CS Lewis? In any case, if Rowling is Wiccan, she does a much better job of hiding it than Lewis did his Christianity. The magic in the Harry Potter books isn't even vaguely Wiccan. For example, Harry Potter's magic depends upon magic words and waving of wands, with no invocations of gods or other supernatural entities, whereas Wiccan magic is ritualistic and invocation-based. Actually, Harry Potter's magic seems to owe more to stage magic than to anything in Wicca.
(ignoring transient local changes) I'm not ignoring those, because in the real world, you really can't ignore them.
Actually, it's the other way around. That is to say that in the real world, over a broad range of heat inputs, using standard measuring implements, you cannot detect any change in the temperature of the ice/water bath. However, if you want to depart from real world measurements and get theoretical, you can make a reasonable argument that on a molecular level with a sufficiently high rate of heat input, there should be transient, small-scale temperature gradients.
Not quite -- When you cool your warm can of soda (pop whatever) in the tub of ice the tub of ice does get warmer! Just not very much warmer.
Mother nature always balances her checkbooks you know. The tub of ice took on exactly the same amount of heat that the can gave up. 'Cause it takes so much more heat to raise the tub of ice one degree than it does the can of soda you don't notice the change in the temperature of the tub of ice.
You are confusing temperature with energy. The amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature a substance one degree is not constant. In particular, in a bath of ice + water, the amount of energy required to raise the temperature even slightly is equal to the amount of energy required to melt every bit of ice--i.e. the heat of fusion. Only when you have paid the energy bill for melting all of the ice do you start to see a rise in temperature. Perhaps this graph will make it a bit clearer.
And where then, pray tell, does the energy go? it doesn't just disappear (conservation of energy)
Energy doesn't get "used up" and vanish into the eather.
Of course not. But heat is not the only form of energy. I can use energy to lift a weight. If I do this carefully, the weight does not warm up. Nevertheless, the energy does not "vanish into the ether"; it is stored as gravitational potential energy, which can be extracted at a later time by letting the weight drop. Similarly, there is such a thing as chemical potential energy. It takes a certain amount of energy (79.7 cal/g) to convert ice at 0 C into water at 0 C. This is known as the heat of fusion
Yes, but we're not talking about a state change here, at least not for the liquid water. The ice does go through a state change in order to transition to liquid water, but the liquid water has to get from 0 C to 100 C, and it does so, but in this case it does so very, very slowly because of the dispersal of the thermodynamic change.
The state change is from solid water (ice) to liquid water. All of the energy goes into converting ice to water, so the temperature of the bath does not change.
That's not really true - in an icewater bath, the differentiation in temperature is dispersed throughout the bath (= a larger volume), so the overall change for the entire bath is very very small, but it does in fact still exist.
Incorrect. It doesn't matter what the volume is, so long as there is both ice and water present. It's analogous to the way that you can't increase the temperature of a boiling water bath above 100 C by turning up the fire (ignoring transient local changes). All of the energy goes into the state change and the temperature remains constant.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole thing reaks of corruption. And it would be totally unnecessary if NIH licensed its research to anyone free of charge, enabling competition on the quality of the execution of the drug.
In which case Bristol-Meyers would have made even more money. Of course, the NIH could try to reserve all patents to itself, and license the drug widely and cheaply, but then who would do the extensive clinical safety testing required to bring a drug to market? Not NIH; they don't have the budget, and in the current political climate, they aren't likely to get it. We need those tax dollars for the perpetual war on terror. Not the generic drug makers, either. Their profit margins are so slim that they can't afford to do that kind of research--their business model is based on waiting until somebody else has done all of those expensive safety studies.
After all NIH's role is research. And by doing so, the drug would not cost the public further 5 billion that went to the fucking Bristol-Meyers (they made 2 billion profit!). Instead 20 generic makers would make it for 1/100th the cost and sold at 1/100th the price. NIH's mission is to help US citizens to get healthy.
More likely, nobody would be making it at all. The generic drug makers wouldn't be able to afford the safety and efficacy testing, and the big pharmaceutical houses wouldn't want to make such a big investment when the profit potential is so slight. They'd choose instead to invest their money in developing another drug that does the same thing, but for which they can retain all of the rights. Result: drugs are just as expensive, but they take a lot longer to get to market. This isn't just extrapolation; this is what used to happen before restrictions on licensing discoveries to industry were liberalized.
Actually they go there to get filthy rich. If pursuit of knowledge was their thing, they would take a grant and publish the results like any other scientist.
Yeah, filthy rich. You seem very ready to presume that if somebody wants a higher salary, they must be greedy. We had an excellent postdoc who left to work in industry because they could afford to pay him enough to afford to care for his disabled child. If your work is of interest to industry, why not pursue it in that context? With fewer commitments to teaching, administration, and grant-writing, you have more time to focus on research. And you can still publish your results--many drug-discovery firms encourage publication, and some even demand it.
You must be kidding... oh wait.. you mean succesful at protecting the "brand name" companies from themselves, the public and from any competition? Claiming Canadian generics are "unsafe"? Demanding massive amounts of paperwork to prevent entry of cheaper alternatives into marketplace? Hiding evidence of side-effects when a "brand" is threatened? Yes they do fine job indeed for their masters.
No, I mean fairly successful in balancing the demands of protecting the public against the demands of patients for new drugs when the old ones don't work well enough. Look into the history of patent medicines before the FDA--or for that matter, recent problems with ephedrine-containing "diet supplements" exempted from FDA scrutiny. I don't agree that Canadian drugs are unsafe (the issue, by the way, is patented drugs sold more cheaply, not "generics"), but I can understand why the FDA, which is charged with protecting the American public, is reluctant to rubber-stamp drugs that have not been subjected to their quality-control system. Can you document any case of the FDA concealing side-effects?
The fact that you claim that perfectly functional, slightly inferior product makes no money is dead giveway that these people are crooks of the highest order.
Keep in mind that where a drug is concerned, "slightly inferior" can mean less likely to save your life and more likely to kill you (or at least make you miserably ill). Is it really any surprise that patients prefer to take the "slightly superior" drug if they have any choice?
If they were humanitarians you claim them to be, or even plain businessmen, they would market the older version to people who cant afford the "new and improved" one, but instead they'd rather have it made illegal to prevent the suckers
I don't know of any case where an older drug has been made "illegal" in the absence of any serious toxicity problem. Older drugs are indeed sold more cheaply--you have to cut the price to sell a product against a superior competitor.
Dude, you should scroll back to the news story that started this whole conversation. Something about "public funding" for "private patent"?
Read it more carefully. The public funding was actually granted to public institutions like universities and the NIH. The drug, Taxol, was subsequently licensed by Bristol-Meyers. The GAO thought that the NIH underpriced it. I have a lot of respect for the GAO, so they may well be right. But restrospective assessments of the value of risky investments are notoriously difficult.
If an investment has the potential to yield a 20% profit, but had only a 20% chance of succeeding, then what you are willing to pay for that investment has to be calculated on the basis of a 5% rate of return. When Bristol-Meyers licensed the compound, the clinical trials were not even finished. That means that the compound still could have failed to be useful. Bristol-Meyers still had to make the investment in making Taxol in large quantities. So Bristol-Meyers could have taken a huge bath on the deal. The question is whether anybody would have been willing to pay more for the license at the time. And keep in mind that any delay in development would have meant more people dead from cancer.
Oh, yes I do, I am having it both ways. If all the resources of private enterpises are put into one reasearch line, that in one fell swoop achieves both: removes top talent from the other lines of inquiry and makes most of the facilities unavailable for other research, plus leaves everybody else scrambling for remaining scraps.
Nope. That's the thing about the top people--they don't necessarily go where the money is, because they are interested in what they are interested in. The top people I know who went into industry didn't go there because they were looking for more money--they went them there because the science that interested them happened to lead them in a direction that was of interest to pharmaceutical companies. Neither are facilities limiting. Get a grant, and you can build yourself a facility. The fact that a pharmaceutical company builds a research facility doesn't prevent me from building one.
FDA exists as a feeble attempt to control abuses by the very drug companies you defend.
And for the most part, they are fairly successful. In fact, pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars generating the data that the FDA demands, and that is one factor in the high cost of drug development that has made it virtually inaccessible to anybody outside "Big Pharma".
Err.. wait, how do drugs get "obsolete"? They stop working? Perheaps some anti-biotics do, but other types? A new, improved one is made, sure, but how many old ones cease to function? You know it is not like a "fashion" trend is present in drug use. Noone gets new "seasonal styles" or a color to match one's dress.
Drugs get obsolete when other, better drugs become available--drugs that have a better chance of helping the patient and a lower risk of hurting him. Or that patients prefer because they have better pharmacokinetics, so that they can take their medication on a more reasonable schedule. And a perfectly good drug may cease to be profitable simply because it goes out of patent. Often, by the time a drug gets approved by the FDA, the patent only has a few years to run. Sure, Lord of the Rings is going to be a great movie 10 years from now, but it isn't going to be making enough money to keep a studio in business. A studio needs to make new movies to survive. Similarly, drug companies require new discoveries to survive.
Oh yes, that justifies all. We should all gamble public funds in corporate roulettes in hopes that some useful side-effects occur and when a windfall is made, the corporation naturally keeps the benefits. Rather then funding academic research and making corporations compete on manufacturing and delivery.
No, the public funds go to nonprofit institutions such as universities, not to pharmaceutical companies. The way that research gets to pharmaceutical companies is either by reading the literature (for example, the research of academic researchers such as Furchgott whose basic science discoveries led to Viagra), or by licensing patented inventions from the universities. The universities then take the royalties and use those to fund additional basic science research.
Except that funding comes only of you do research in easilly marketable, high-profit drugs. You dont want to? No funding. That is how everyone is doing Viagras and other "lifestyle" drugs.
You can't have it both ways. First you were arguing that money for research on Viagra like drugs makes working on them so attractive that it will pull people away from other lines of research, now you are complaining that people won't want to do that kind of research. The people who don't want to work on marketable drugs can do publicly (or foundation) fundable research just the way they do today. The ones who want a little more money, or who just happen to be interested in the basic science that underlies a marketable drug, can work for the drug companies.
I cant believe this is coming from someone in academia. As someone in business, let me tell you how it works: making more money, means more profit. Thats it. That is the entire point of the operation. If investing in marketing produces more profit, so it is done. If one can make a fake "drug" whereby the main ingredient is sugar and salt, and the "research" was conducted by someone else and the manufacturing can be done by a set of rented monkeys, plus the "drug" has highly-addictive properties, that constitutes a most desirable and optimal situation.
Yes, there are companies that work that way--they mainly sell "natural herbal diet supplements" that allow them to avoid the scrutiny of the FDA. It's probably a more reliable route to riches than doing drug discovery. But in the pharmaceutical industry, making a real drug that actually helps people turns out to be the only sure strategy for keeping those profits going. The pharmaceutical research directors I've met aren't scam artists; they're scientists who are primarily interested in making discoveries and helping people, and who are happy to have managed to find a way to do that and make a good living at the same time. That just turns out to be the kind of guy who is best at doing the sort of research that makes big profits for pharmaceutical companies
Marketing won't keep those profits coming year to year, because patents run out and competitors appear, and eventually no amount of marketing will sell an obsolete drug. So the only way for a drug company to maintain profitability is to keep making discoveries. And because marketing brings in more money than it costs, it helps to provide the cash flow that is necessary to do that research. If pharmaceutical companies stopped marketing their products, they would have less money to invest in research, not more.
That is merely a lucky fluke. If Viagra produced nothing of the sort, it would still receive the attention it did.
Undoubtedly. But it turns out to be the rule rather than the exception, because in biology, everything is connected. So there is no way to direct your research only toward profitable drugs, because you don't know which information is useful for that purpose, and which is useful for other things, until you have it. It works the other way, too. The original line of research that ultimately led to Viagra wasn't directed toward making a profitable drug. It all came out of Bob Furchgott's work, and he wasn't trying to make a drug at all. He was trying to answer a basic science question in pharmacology: how does acetylcholine dilate blood vessels?
So far I've increased my collection by 52 movies in the last month, at about 90 cents each (DVD+R + jewel case + prorated Movie Pass)
The problem with maintaining a collection like this is that it takes up valuable space, not to mention time. Kids may watch a movie 50 times, but I don't. If could get a video reliably and quickly over the net when I wanted to see it, I'd pay a few bucks per download just so I wouldn't have to bother shelving them.
As for the $300 package, $300 would buy me five years worth of TWC DVR service. I find it highly unlikely anyone will *really* be using that 5 year old modded TiVo at that point. Maybe some people would, but I'm usually much faster on the electronics upgrade cycle than that.
I wouldn't think the business model would be the stand-alone TiVo. It would probably be more like the DirecTiVo, currently available for free to new customers from many installers, with an additional programming cost of $5/month (which covers any number of DirecTiVo units in the house). In a year or two, they'll probably be offering the same deal for the High Definition TiVo.
This sounds great (I have both a Tivo and Netflix subscription) but I'm worried about the sound quality coming out of the Tivo. Right now, the Tivo doesn't support multi-channel output so I think the best movies via the Tivo could do would be Stereo sounds. :( Is this the case?
The new High Definition TiVos support multichannel output. At the moment, that system is still priced for the videophile market ($1000), but in a couple of years they'll probably be handing it out for $100 with a couple of months free rentals included.
Being able to download DVDs to my TiVo is something I'd probably do occasionally when the video shop a couple of blocks from my home doesn't have what I want. On the other hand, if I could download better-than-DVDs to my high-definition TiVo, I'd probably go to my TiVo first, and check the video store if TiVo couldn't get it.
You are quite naive, Sir. There is a finite amount of reserch facilities and personell available, not to mention top scientific talent. If you put them to work on viagras of the world, very few remain to do anything else.
Speaking as research pharmacologist who sits on the admissions committee of an academic Pharmacology Dept., this is nonsense. We are nowhere close to depleting the worldwide reserves of talented people interested in doing biomedical research. If you fund it, they will come.
You mean in marketing? Yes, Pfizer does research but its research budget is but a fraction of its marketing budget. Just like most drug companies. The point is that Pfizer and the rest of them are ill equipped and have too many conflicts of interest to be allowed to be in charge of such critical thing like medical research.
Think about this for a moment. Do you really imagine that companies invest in marketing to throw money away? Marketing makes money, by increasing sales. That's why they do it. More sales means more money to invest in research.
It is not frivolous for what it cures. It is frivolous for the amount of resources (from Pfizer and all the competitors in mad rush to replicate something like it) that it consumes when compared to the severity of the ills that it addresses. It is an example of profit motive being superior to anything else.
No, it is an example of the profit motive leading people to serve the public interest in spite of themselves. Because the fundamental vascular and biochemical mechanisms that make Viagra work turn out to be critical for understanding things like heart disease and stroke .
There would be less frivolous drugs (viagra?) which consume bulk of the private research funds. Instead there would be publically founded research (which apparently is already done) coupled with a large array of generic drug makers, competing on manufacuring quality and price.
This is nonsense. A drug such as Viagra doesn't "consume" private research funds. Viagra makes money for Pfizer, who can then invest the profits in other research projects. And it is worth noting that the basic science behind Viagra is also relevant to finding treatments for less "frivolous" (although I wouldn't use that word to anybody actually suffering from erectile disfunction) ailments.
However, scientific research is only of benefit to all if all the parties involved share the results of their work with each other, freely and without restriction. You can bet your boots that China will not share the results of any valuable lines of investigation with us, but they are perfectly happy to take what we make available for free.
US scientists share their research by publishing it in publicly available (albeit generally not free as in beer) journals because it is the sharing of information that has enables rapid scientific progress. They also do so because such published research effectively functions as an advertisement for their capabilities, and helps them to negotiate better jobs and obtain better grants. Scientists in other countries that have strong research efforts do the same. It's not a matter of being "open to foreign powers;" it's just the only way of doing science that works.
Even many private companies publish their work, once the patents are filed. They are not obliged to do so, but they find that participation in the scientific publication process increases the quality of their internal research.
hopefully this will help filter out bogus research by opening it up to more eyes.
Probably not. Most of the people who know enough about a field to usefully critique this kind of highly technical paper already have access to a university library.
Also, people have been a little miffed by some design choices. Why have all the wires running out the back of the screen instead of the base (I know, I know, wireless keyboard and mouse -- but most people will be hooking a printer up to this thing).
That can also be done wirelessly with Airport Express.
That's why such experiments are published in peer-review journals rather than the general media. That way if someone has problems repelicating an experiment they can work throught them with the original experimenters, before the general public ever gets involved.
Yeah, right. Do you really imagine that the reviewers try to replicate the result? Typically, you get the paper from the journal and you have maybe a couple of weeks to evaluate it. The journal doesn't send you any money to replicate the experiments, and you probably aren't funded to do it on your existing grants. Papers don't get rejected because somebody tried to replicate it and failed--they get rejected because something isn't adequately explained, or the conclusions don't follow from the results, or the data is not of sufficient quality, or it just isn't exciting enough to meet the journal's standards.
The reality is that it is commonplace to try to replicate something that has been published in the peer-reviewed literature and fail. Often, you futz with the procedure a while and get it to work with slightly different conditions. Sometimes it just starts working once you get a little practice, and you aren't quite sure why. And most of the time, you don't spend a lot of time trying to figure it out--you're probably trying to do something else, anyway since simply replicating somebody else's work (or worse, failing to replicate it) won't get you published. And 99.9% of the time figuring out the details of this kind of problem doesn't lead anywhere interesting. Of course, there is that other 0.1% -- Bob Furchgott took the trouble to figure out why acetylcholine relaxed vascular smooth muscle for one technician and not for another, and it led to a Nobel Prize (and Viagra).
If you can't describe the environment in which an experiment can be reproduced reliably, you don't understand the phenominon properly enough to be calling press conferences.
Unfortunately, the first clue that this is the case is often when somebody else tries to reproduce the phenomenon and fails. You describe everything about the conditions that seems potentially relevant, but you have to draw the line at some point. Anybody who has ever tried to debug a difficult-to-reproduce phenomenon knows how difficult can be. It works perfectly for one guy, and another guy who seems to be doing essentially the same thing gets a different result. The uncontrolled factor often turns out to be something that nobody even imagined would be important.
Oh god... how many times do we have to hear this stupid argument????? The fact is, the price point of these players does not make sense from a logical point of view. I know that people are dumb, so they buy at strange price points, but this does not make the pricing of the mini or this thing a good thing.
From a logical point of view, the price should be a good match to the value of the item to the prospective buyer. Judging by Apple's profits, they did a very good job of matching price to value. Perhaps Apple simply took the trouble to understand what people actually like, instead of trying to dictate what they should like and dismissing anybody with different preferences as "dumb."
This is fallacious reasoning. Would you buy a keyboard that had a wheel instead of buttons?
No. Wheels are much better than buttons for some things--scrolling through a list of a large number of items or inputting continuous or near-continuous quantities--but buttons have the advantage for random-access selection from a small, fixed list. It's simply a matter of the right tool for the job.
Which doesn't contadict my statement that Wicca doesn't feature Satan as a character...
That may be because I was under the impression that I was agreeing with you....
It's not just in your mind. Wicca just doesn't feature Satan as a character.
No, Wicca is a modern recreation of pre-Christian pagan belief. Satanism is a Christian heresy--it accepts the Christian supernatural entities, but differs in the form of devotion.
Also, the author of Harry Potter is a proponent of wicca.
I can't see why this sort of ad hominem should be relevant. Would the books be more acceptable if she were Christian, like CS Lewis? In any case, if Rowling is Wiccan, she does a much better job of hiding it than Lewis did his Christianity. The magic in the Harry Potter books isn't even vaguely Wiccan. For example, Harry Potter's magic depends upon magic words and waving of wands, with no invocations of gods or other supernatural entities, whereas Wiccan magic is ritualistic and invocation-based. Actually, Harry Potter's magic seems to owe more to stage magic than to anything in Wicca.
(ignoring transient local changes) I'm not ignoring those, because in the real world, you really can't ignore them.
Actually, it's the other way around. That is to say that in the real world, over a broad range of heat inputs, using standard measuring implements, you cannot detect any change in the temperature of the ice/water bath. However, if you want to depart from real world measurements and get theoretical, you can make a reasonable argument that on a molecular level with a sufficiently high rate of heat input, there should be transient, small-scale temperature gradients.
Not quite -- When you cool your warm can of soda (pop whatever) in the tub of ice the tub of ice does get warmer! Just not very much warmer.
Mother nature always balances her checkbooks you know. The tub of ice took on exactly the same amount of heat that the can gave up. 'Cause it takes so much more heat to raise the tub of ice one degree than it does the can of soda you don't notice the change in the temperature of the tub of ice.
You are confusing temperature with energy. The amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature a substance one degree is not constant. In particular, in a bath of ice + water, the amount of energy required to raise the temperature even slightly is equal to the amount of energy required to melt every bit of ice--i.e. the heat of fusion. Only when you have paid the energy bill for melting all of the ice do you start to see a rise in temperature. Perhaps this graph will make it a bit clearer.
And where then, pray tell, does the energy go? it doesn't just disappear (conservation of energy)
Energy doesn't get "used up" and vanish into the eather.
Of course not. But heat is not the only form of energy. I can use energy to lift a weight. If I do this carefully, the weight does not warm up. Nevertheless, the energy does not "vanish into the ether"; it is stored as gravitational potential energy, which can be extracted at a later time by letting the weight drop. Similarly, there is such a thing as chemical potential energy. It takes a certain amount of energy (79.7 cal/g) to convert ice at 0 C into water at 0 C. This is known as the heat of fusion
Yes, but we're not talking about a state change here, at least not for the liquid water. The ice does go through a state change in order to transition to liquid water, but the liquid water has to get from 0 C to 100 C, and it does so, but in this case it does so very, very slowly because of the dispersal of the thermodynamic change.
The state change is from solid water (ice) to liquid water. All of the energy goes into converting ice to water, so the temperature of the bath does not change.
That's not really true - in an icewater bath, the differentiation in temperature is dispersed throughout the bath (= a larger volume), so the overall change for the entire bath is very very small, but it does in fact still exist.
Incorrect. It doesn't matter what the volume is, so long as there is both ice and water present. It's analogous to the way that you can't increase the temperature of a boiling water bath above 100 C by turning up the fire (ignoring transient local changes). All of the energy goes into the state change and the temperature remains constant.