[BlazingArizona]

I've been claiming for years on FR medical threads that the monopoly nature of our medical system locks out innovation. Whenever I describe today's healthcare system as a medieval guild, I've been accused of being a "libertarian pipedreamer". But don't listen to me - Andrew Grove just said it better than I ever could, and to an audience of neurosurgeons.

Let the revolution begin!

[muawiyah]

Getting “compounds approved” is a charge against the government, not the pharmaceutical companies.

[muawiyah]

Also like to note that injecting drugs into a human is a bit different than dropping a chip into a CD player.

The product liability issues might even involve MURDER CHARGES, and you usually don't go that route in electronics.

[ari-freedom]

grants have to be tied to results otherwise of course it will lead to junk science

[bajabaja]

I think your sentiments have been around for at least a century. Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith (circa 1920) shows the same criticisms lodged ficitionally (I think the author's father was a medical doctor). I understand this CEO's complaint about much biomed research today: grant-dependent and not especially directed toward important new understandings -- getting published seems more important.

[Rudder]

...publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways...

The guy, like most laymen, misses the essential point of basic research is to explore knowledge, not to make a better Chevy.

[The_Reader_David]

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).

[AZLiberty]

"Healthcare 3.0: Transforming Medicine Through Collective Intelligence" is an excellent (QuickTime) video on this topic. In this one-hour recorded presentation, another less famous Silicon Valley guru, Marty Tenenbaum, talks about how his diagnosis of cancer (malignant melanoma, with a typical survival time of one year) led him to develop techniques to greatly accelerate progress in cancer treatment.