Full disclosure: I'm a surgery intern who was taking a course in drug action and design from an NIH immunologist at the time the Vioxx story was unfolding. The

Full disclosure: I'm a surgery intern who was taking a course in drug action and design from an NIH immunologist at the time the Vioxx story was unfolding. The real story is how industry lobbyists and Republicans push for a weak FDA and the Dems push for more stringent regulations, which is just fine by the industry so long as the regulatory funding never keeps up. It's essentially another patent office but every new drug application that makes it to approval comes with literally rooms full of documentation. As far as loathing big pharma, they're really the only ones who can play the game because the stringency requirements are so insanely high. Genuinely novel discoveries might come out of universities, and small start-ups might get the prototyps developed, but it's rare for them to survive on their own. They usually end up selling to one of the big companies. From 30,000 feet, the pharma industry looks a lot like the IT industry.