--- Alberto Monteiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ... I claim that has _already_ been oriented to them > in the past 50 or so years, where _no_ significant > disease has found a final _cure_. > > Alberto Monteiro
The problem, Alberto, is that the antibiotics were discovered a little bit before that. Anti-viral research is hard. No one has ever succeeded at that. Why, exactly, do you blame the pharma companies for not succeeding in doing something that no one has ever succeeded in doing? They have successfully managed to cure every bacterial disease - that's a pretty good record. Also, btw, you're completely ignoring the enormous progress that has been made against (for example) cancer. A generation ago (I don't remember the exact numbers, but these will be roughly correct) the majority of pediatric cancer patients died. Now it's under a quarter. Almost all of that improvement is due to the work of the pharmaceutical companies, and that's just a beginning. So if your argument is "We can't beat cancer with one pill, and I blame the pharmacos", well, blame them all you want, but unless you want to point out to me the huge medical advances that (for example) the Soviet Union made I think you've got a pretty difficult situation trying to prove that this is because of a choice on their part. As the chief of R&D at a very large pharmaco said in an interview a couple of weeks ago - "This isn't rocket science. This is _much harder_ than rocket science." You can see a rocket. You know exactly how a rocket works. We don't (for example) understand the liver at all well - we barely understand it at all, really. Drug development is harder now because all of the low-hanging fruit - the bacterial diseases and the easy vaccines, basically - have already been plucked. Now the really hard slog is there. Despite that fact, the same pharma companies that you criticize have managed to change AIDS from a fatal to chronic disease and improve the survival rates for most forms of cancer by _multiples_. Do you think that was _easy_? Merck has more Nobel prize winners on staff than most universities - they didn't win all of those because they do poor work. They won them because they do extraordinary work on exceptionally difficult areas of research. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
