Posted on 11/05/2007 3:08:19 PM PST by BlazingArizona
Former Intel CEO Andrew S. Grove says the pharmaceutical industry could learn a lot from the computer and chip businesses.
...On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Let the revolution begin!
Getting “compounds approved” is a charge against the government, not the pharmaceutical companies.
The product liability issues might even involve MURDER CHARGES, and you usually don't go that route in electronics.
grants have to be tied to results otherwise of course it will lead to junk science
The guy, like most laymen, misses the essential point of basic research is to explore knowledge, not to make a better Chevy.
It's easy to blame government regulations for holding back progress, but the healthcare industry has a long and unsavory history of using governments to keep out competition. In the long run, this is what leads to lack of innovation.
Mission critical product liability exists in the computer field too. Remember the infamous Therac case, in which a program bug gave cancer patients exactly 1,000 times the prescribed dose of radiation?
That’s was the software ~ not the chip per se, but I bet a slick (and corrupt) prosecutor like Sutton could make the charges stick if lodged against the folks working the line at the IBM chip factory.
Let's keep on track here so we'll know who we are supposed to attack.
It’s not just medical research. Any field where one government agency (be it the NIH, the NIMH, or the NSF) is essentially the only source of funding has become moribund. A herd mentality takes over: you can only get funded if you’re doing what everyone else in your field is doing, since peer reviews on grant proposals otherwise mark the proposal down as ‘not mainstream’ or ‘unproven’ or ‘highly speculative’. (Look at theoretical physics, where string theory, 40 years without a testable prediction, predicting a massless scalar-field unobserved in nature, rules the roost.)
University administrations make it worse by seeing the science departments from medicine to physics, mathematics to botany, as cash cows and putting pressure not to tenure professors who don’t bring in grants. As a result only tenured professors can even attempt anything really innovative, and in high-cost fields like medicine or experimental physics only if they can come up with an alternative source of funding (much easier in medicine than in basic research).
Andrew Grove is not a "layman". He founded the most successful microprocessor maker of all time. His industry operates under a set of economic constraints that are identical to those faced by the pharma industry. It costs billions to develop each new product, R&D amounts to a large percentage of the company's costs, and the product liability exposure is just as high, which mandates a lot of testing.
What makes the difference is that the free-market culture of the semiconductor industry has resisted government control and monopoly formation from the beginning. Medicine is, in contrast, a medieval guild that uses shamanic claims ("The human body is sacred! Sacred, I tell you! Too divine to be entrusted to the turmoil of the marketplace!") to keep the serfs in line.
By that, I meant he is not a scientist. R&D is not basic science. You confound basic science with applied science. Asking a basic scientist to do applied science is like asking a devoted wife to become a street whore--they both have sex, but...
Thus, criticizing an agency that funds basic science because it doesn't enhance pharmaceutical R&D is akin to chastising your wife for not bringing home the pimp's fee.
Know one knows this more than Intel, which conducts a massive amount of not just development of the next chip, but research into the basic physics that lead to new generations of devices. My interest in this article is not just political, but comes from my own years of experience as a software contractor in Intel's Arizona facilities. Have you ever worked in a building with a water tower outside your office window? Only it's not water but liquid nitrogen, which is plumbed through to labs throughout the building.
Actually, I work in one now: the physics department my math department shares a building with has a huge liquid N_2 tank for cooling the particle accelerator in the basement.
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