Gautam Mukunda 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_. > > The problem, Alberto, is that the antibiotics were > discovered a little bit before that. > Yep. And vaccines another 50 years before that. And sterile surgery another 50. So maybe there's a 50-year-cycle here :-)
> Anti-viral > research is hard. No one has ever succeeded at that. > And I have a suspicion as to _why_. Every other science has progressed geometrically over the past 50 years. If Medicine had advanced the way computers have, we would have a life expectancy of 500 years [except that once every 42 days our bodies would burn, and we would have to be rebuild from the clone backup :-)] > Why, exactly, do you blame the pharma companies for > not succeeding in doing something that no one has ever > succeeded in doing? > I am not blaming them for _not_ doing this. I am blaming everybody else that allows them to control medical research. > They have successfully managed to > cure every bacterial disease - that's a pretty good > record. > Did they? What about the new superbacterias that resist every antibiotic? > Also, btw, you're completely ignoring the enormous > progress that has been made against (for example) > cancer. > No, I am not. But there is no _cure_, just expensive drugs to turn cancer into a chronical disease. > 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. > Who extract huge profits from drugs that keep cancer patients bound to them _forever_. > 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. > Ok, but then it's still 0 x 0 :-) > 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. > I don't doubt the difficulty of the problem, and I don't deny that they deserve merit for those paliative drugs. But your keen understanding of _Capitalist_ just clarified my point. Do you think you are so much smarter than any advisor that has ever counseled the drug companies? Don't you think any other intelligent consultant could duplicate your reasoning that it's a bad idea to research a drug that cures disease X instead of a drug that keeps a X-patient forced _forever_ to buy drugs that will extend his life? Capitalism has no compassion :-/ Alberto Monteiro _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
