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It's really shocking to such an anti-technological development comment on site about technological development. If the federal government had locked down all I

It's really shocking to such an anti-technological development comment on site about technological development. If the federal government had locked down all IT development in the 1980s as you proposing they do for pharmaceuticals, we wouldn't have this forum to comment on, much less the industry it is built around.

JulianMorrison 11y ago
It really isn't comparable. Computers are tools. Drugs are health. They are a public good and a natural human right. Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system. Mixing them up like the USA system does is a category error.
- if_by_whisky 11y ago
  Your solution would stop innovation in any industry
  - clavalle 11y ago
    Because innovation cannot exist outside a purely market driven system?
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      Improving things just to improve them and research just for curiosity's sake are foreign concepts to those running the markets.
      - vonmoltke 11y ago
        To be fair, they are foreign concepts to a lot of people in general.
  - mvanvoorden 11y ago
    Innovation happens because people are curious and want to make their (or other's) lives easier, this has nothing to do with patents, or if it's private or government run. Want to see real innovation? See for example the home made radio receivers people made in WWII, that fit in a small tin can, or visit an Amish settlement (http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/). Not to mention hacker/maker spaces and fablabs, which all work on open source principles and sustain themselves through donations or member fees.
    - Kalium 11y ago
      Yes and no. Many kinds of innovation happen because people are curious... provided they can afford to indulge their curiosity. Of course, I don't know many people who can personally afford to do the kind of research they are employed to do, so there are important limits at work. Funding plays a major role in enabling curiosity. That said, there's also application. Curiosity may lead to someone discovering a particular complex chemical, but curiosity won't turn it into a cheaply produced pill available at your corner pharmacy.
    - mason240 11y ago
      Anecdotes aside, they still require massive amounts of capital in order to create useful applications. Hobbyists tinkering in a hanger did not create modern airlines - giant corporations like Boeing managed the capital required to make it happen. Hobbyists tinkering in a garage are not going to be able to carry out years of dedicated research followed by years of study followed by years of clinical trials.
- ctlby 11y ago
  Drugs are a complex good created through the intensive efforts of highly intelligent, trained human beings. They are anything but a natural right.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Replace drug with aircraft and few people will say the military should be private.
    - ctlby 11y ago
      You can believe that the government should provision military defense and still find laughable the claim that one "deserves" a sophisticated fighter jet flying overhead.
      - Retric 11y ago
        Having a credible level of deturance might not need cutting edge aircraft, but things have progressed past the point where pointed sticks are sufficent so some form of flight capability is required.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    That is absolutely true, and is also true of clean drinking water, sewage treatment and security of the person. We can choose to make these things available by our common efforts.
    - blumkvist 11y ago
      And who is going to be in charge of them? Will they not become corrupt? That's a rhetorical question, of course. When they do get corrupt what do we do, since it's the same guys with the guns and court houses?
      - robotresearcher 11y ago
        Is there clean drinking water in your house? Did you pay insane amounts for it? Do you live in fear of oppression by the water company? There are some very messed-up public works, but most of the time it works pretty well.
- mason240 11y ago
  They are directly comparable. New drugs don't materialize out of thin air any more than the iPhones or any other applications of basic internet protocols did. Imagine if in the early 90s we had stiffed cellular phone technology because "only the rich have access to it" or general internet/network technology because "only banks and giant corporations have access to it." Thanks to capitalism, the technology is now so permeates all sectors of society that some have argued that access it that internet access and smart phones are a human right that should be socialized by the government.
  - JulianMorrison 11y ago
    New drugs come from universities, and from people motivated by the combination of public-spiritedness and academic success. Tax would pay their grants, tax would fund the trials, and tax would fund the production and packaging. Do roads and public water sanitation materialize out of thin air?
    - mason240 11y ago
      I'm confused why would think that roads (a basic network utility) are comparable to IT applications that use use a basic network utility. IT applications are to the internet what food delivery, personal transportation or freight transportation are to roads. Researching drugs or developing IT applications are not basic commodities.
    - dlss 11y ago
      > New drugs come from universities, and from people motivated by the combination of public-spiritedness and academic success. Ahh, hmm, I'm wanting to ask if you know anyone working on drugs without sounding rude. In my experience they are like doctors. Lilly researchers do enjoy the thought of helping people, but mostly in the abstract. In the concrete they like complaining about people and regulation :) they also very much like living the "good life". I'm not saying we'd lose all drug researchers if it were nationalized, but I do think we'd lose a lot of them -- at the end of the day, most people do want money, and end up being motivated to pursue careers which are financially rewarded. A full time doctors without borders just wouldn't work IMO. As to the claim that drugs come from universities... You can take an interesting research finding and turn it into a potential drug... but there's a tremendous amount of work remaining, which isn't particularly interesting / researchy, and still requires someone very smart to do it. Essentially the more financially motivated people in academia are the ones who volunteer for what is often a fool's errand (a failed drug). I think the "new drugs come from universities" position is also true in the sense that "biologists get degrees from university" -- but as others pointed out, that sense is true for all industries.
- rsync 11y ago
  "Drugs are health." Only a sick (person/group/society/culture) would link them like this. Drugs are, in fact, dis-ease. They are the opposite of health. Real food, real exercise, real work and real sleep. That's health. Drugs are at best dis-ease and at worst tools of predation and exploitation.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Why don't you come back and sing that tune when you're old.
    - rsync 11y ago
      Presumably I will be in a state of dis-ease ... I will be sick in one or more ways. You're making my point for me.
      - Retra 11y ago
        Pretending someone who disagrees with you is arguing your point is... pretty dumb, to be frank. Or did you think I would just get unbearably confused by your cartoonish switcheroo?
- mindcrime 11y ago
  They are a public good and a natural human right. No they aren't. Saying that is equivalent to saying that you would be justified in putting a gun to a chemist's head and forcing him to make a drug for you even if he didn't want to. But there's no reason to say that your "right" to a drug trumps his right to be free from threat of violence and denial of agency. What you're talking about is more of an entitlement than a right. Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system. Why exactly should I feel like society owes me health care that I can't pay for? Especially when the model involves a scenario where my getting health-care possibly involves using violence, or threat of violence, to make somebody else provide that care? How is that ethical?
  - JulianMorrison 11y ago
    Yeah, yeah, I've read Ayn Rand too, but she's wrong. Even from a selfish perspective, public health is so crammed with positive externalities it pays for itself. Nobody's going to force chemists to make drugs. Instead the way tax works is that you force everyone to pay a fraction of their productivity into a fund that gets spent paying the chemist to make drugs, the pharmacist to deliver them, etc. It's very similar to insurance except that it doesn't have the perverse motivation to deny you care, and it's compulsory because a civilized society values people not writhing in pain and dying from uncured curable disease more highly than losing a fraction of their time working for the state to prevent it.
    - gknoy 11y ago
      Judging from most of my Facebook feed, it feels like a lot of people in this country do not value that more highly than miniscule taxes.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
huxley 11y ago
It's anti-corporate not anti-technological, not quite the same thing. After all the open and free Internet is the creation of government departments and government-funded universities. I don't believe that anything as extreme as the parent suggests is necessary but I do believe that we should have enforceable transparency in the pharmaceuticals industry R&D costs and/or decoupling the drug trials system so that the trials have to be carried out by an independent third party.
- mason240 11y ago
  >After all the open and free Internet Yes, the dumb pipes of internet are. The applications, like this website, that actually make use of those dumb pipes are not.
- hueving 11y ago
  >It's anti-corporate not anti-technological, not quite the same thing. After all the open and free Internet is the creation of government departments and government-funded universities. The only thing that made it useful though was commercialization.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    Imagine all the for-profit stuff on the internet went away. The remainder would still be one of the most useful things ever created by humanity.
hiram112 11y ago
I'd be happy if Big Pharma had to play on the same field as us. But as it is now, they reap huge amounts of cash from NIH and other public entities for research. Of course, the profits are all privatized. For 20+ years, they've been moving more and more of their R&D and manufacturing overseas to save on labor costs. They then get Congress to approve of anti-competitive laws that disallow citizens from importing cheaper drugs from overseas for both use and resale. Big Pharma should have to compete on the same level as labor.
charonn0 11y ago
The comparison is specious. People die when drug development fails, is too expensive, or is done too slowly (or not at all.)

JulianMorrison 11y ago

It really isn't comparable. Computers are tools. Drugs are health. They are a public good and a natural human right. Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system. Mixing them up like the USA system does is a category error.

if_by_whisky 11y ago
Your solution would stop innovation in any industry
- clavalle 11y ago
  Because innovation cannot exist outside a purely market driven system?
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Improving things just to improve them and research just for curiosity's sake are foreign concepts to those running the markets.
    - vonmoltke 11y ago
      To be fair, they are foreign concepts to a lot of people in general.
- mvanvoorden 11y ago
  Innovation happens because people are curious and want to make their (or other's) lives easier, this has nothing to do with patents, or if it's private or government run. Want to see real innovation? See for example the home made radio receivers people made in WWII, that fit in a small tin can, or visit an Amish settlement (http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/). Not to mention hacker/maker spaces and fablabs, which all work on open source principles and sustain themselves through donations or member fees.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Yes and no. Many kinds of innovation happen because people are curious... provided they can afford to indulge their curiosity. Of course, I don't know many people who can personally afford to do the kind of research they are employed to do, so there are important limits at work. Funding plays a major role in enabling curiosity. That said, there's also application. Curiosity may lead to someone discovering a particular complex chemical, but curiosity won't turn it into a cheaply produced pill available at your corner pharmacy.
  - mason240 11y ago
    Anecdotes aside, they still require massive amounts of capital in order to create useful applications. Hobbyists tinkering in a hanger did not create modern airlines - giant corporations like Boeing managed the capital required to make it happen. Hobbyists tinkering in a garage are not going to be able to carry out years of dedicated research followed by years of study followed by years of clinical trials.
ctlby 11y ago
Drugs are a complex good created through the intensive efforts of highly intelligent, trained human beings. They are anything but a natural right.
- Retric 11y ago
  Replace drug with aircraft and few people will say the military should be private.
  - ctlby 11y ago
    You can believe that the government should provision military defense and still find laughable the claim that one "deserves" a sophisticated fighter jet flying overhead.
    - Retric 11y ago
      Having a credible level of deturance might not need cutting edge aircraft, but things have progressed past the point where pointed sticks are sufficent so some form of flight capability is required.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  That is absolutely true, and is also true of clean drinking water, sewage treatment and security of the person. We can choose to make these things available by our common efforts.
  - blumkvist 11y ago
    And who is going to be in charge of them? Will they not become corrupt? That's a rhetorical question, of course. When they do get corrupt what do we do, since it's the same guys with the guns and court houses?
    - robotresearcher 11y ago
      Is there clean drinking water in your house? Did you pay insane amounts for it? Do you live in fear of oppression by the water company? There are some very messed-up public works, but most of the time it works pretty well.
mason240 11y ago
They are directly comparable. New drugs don't materialize out of thin air any more than the iPhones or any other applications of basic internet protocols did. Imagine if in the early 90s we had stiffed cellular phone technology because "only the rich have access to it" or general internet/network technology because "only banks and giant corporations have access to it." Thanks to capitalism, the technology is now so permeates all sectors of society that some have argued that access it that internet access and smart phones are a human right that should be socialized by the government.
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  New drugs come from universities, and from people motivated by the combination of public-spiritedness and academic success. Tax would pay their grants, tax would fund the trials, and tax would fund the production and packaging. Do roads and public water sanitation materialize out of thin air?
  - mason240 11y ago
    I'm confused why would think that roads (a basic network utility) are comparable to IT applications that use use a basic network utility. IT applications are to the internet what food delivery, personal transportation or freight transportation are to roads. Researching drugs or developing IT applications are not basic commodities.
  - dlss 11y ago
    > New drugs come from universities, and from people motivated by the combination of public-spiritedness and academic success. Ahh, hmm, I'm wanting to ask if you know anyone working on drugs without sounding rude. In my experience they are like doctors. Lilly researchers do enjoy the thought of helping people, but mostly in the abstract. In the concrete they like complaining about people and regulation :) they also very much like living the "good life". I'm not saying we'd lose all drug researchers if it were nationalized, but I do think we'd lose a lot of them -- at the end of the day, most people do want money, and end up being motivated to pursue careers which are financially rewarded. A full time doctors without borders just wouldn't work IMO. As to the claim that drugs come from universities... You can take an interesting research finding and turn it into a potential drug... but there's a tremendous amount of work remaining, which isn't particularly interesting / researchy, and still requires someone very smart to do it. Essentially the more financially motivated people in academia are the ones who volunteer for what is often a fool's errand (a failed drug). I think the "new drugs come from universities" position is also true in the sense that "biologists get degrees from university" -- but as others pointed out, that sense is true for all industries.
rsync 11y ago
"Drugs are health." Only a sick (person/group/society/culture) would link them like this. Drugs are, in fact, dis-ease. They are the opposite of health. Real food, real exercise, real work and real sleep. That's health. Drugs are at best dis-ease and at worst tools of predation and exploitation.
- Retra 11y ago
  Why don't you come back and sing that tune when you're old.
  - rsync 11y ago
    Presumably I will be in a state of dis-ease ... I will be sick in one or more ways. You're making my point for me.
    - Retra 11y ago
      Pretending someone who disagrees with you is arguing your point is... pretty dumb, to be frank. Or did you think I would just get unbearably confused by your cartoonish switcheroo?
mindcrime 11y ago
They are a public good and a natural human right. No they aren't. Saying that is equivalent to saying that you would be justified in putting a gun to a chemist's head and forcing him to make a drug for you even if he didn't want to. But there's no reason to say that your "right" to a drug trumps his right to be free from threat of violence and denial of agency. What you're talking about is more of an entitlement than a right. Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system. Why exactly should I feel like society owes me health care that I can't pay for? Especially when the model involves a scenario where my getting health-care possibly involves using violence, or threat of violence, to make somebody else provide that care? How is that ethical?
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  Yeah, yeah, I've read Ayn Rand too, but she's wrong. Even from a selfish perspective, public health is so crammed with positive externalities it pays for itself. Nobody's going to force chemists to make drugs. Instead the way tax works is that you force everyone to pay a fraction of their productivity into a fund that gets spent paying the chemist to make drugs, the pharmacist to deliver them, etc. It's very similar to insurance except that it doesn't have the perverse motivation to deny you care, and it's compulsory because a civilized society values people not writhing in pain and dying from uncured curable disease more highly than losing a fraction of their time working for the state to prevent it.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    Judging from most of my Facebook feed, it feels like a lot of people in this country do not value that more highly than miniscule taxes.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

huxley 11y ago

It's anti-corporate not anti-technological, not quite the same thing. After all the open and free Internet is the creation of government departments and government-funded universities. I don't believe that anything as extreme as the parent suggests is necessary but I do believe that we should have enforceable transparency in the pharmaceuticals industry R&D costs and/or decoupling the drug trials system so that the trials have to be carried out by an independent third party.

mason240 11y ago
>After all the open and free Internet Yes, the dumb pipes of internet are. The applications, like this website, that actually make use of those dumb pipes are not.
hueving 11y ago
>It's anti-corporate not anti-technological, not quite the same thing. After all the open and free Internet is the creation of government departments and government-funded universities. The only thing that made it useful though was commercialization.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  Imagine all the for-profit stuff on the internet went away. The remainder would still be one of the most useful things ever created by humanity.

hiram112 11y ago

I'd be happy if Big Pharma had to play on the same field as us. But as it is now, they reap huge amounts of cash from NIH and other public entities for research. Of course, the profits are all privatized. For 20+ years, they've been moving more and more of their R&D and manufacturing overseas to save on labor costs. They then get Congress to approve of anti-competitive laws that disallow citizens from importing cheaper drugs from overseas for both use and resale. Big Pharma should have to compete on the same level as labor.

charonn0 11y ago

The comparison is specious. People die when drug development fails, is too expensive, or is done too slowly (or not at all.)