Now this is god damn huge. I'm an outsider to this topic and any bio technicians/scientists are welcome to butt in, but as I see it there are at least two seri

Now this is god damn huge. I'm an outsider to this topic and any bio technicians/scientists are welcome to butt in, but as I see it there are at least two serious problems with the industry. 1. Eroom's Law. The cost of drug development has been going up exponentially. It doubles every nine years. Depressing charts are available from Google. Whole R&D departments at pharmaceutical companies have been shed as a result. There is only a handful of the larger pharmaceutical companies still serious about R&D, like Roche and Lily. 2. Personalized medicine, which I take to mean the use of human genomic information in tailoring drugs to individuals or subgroups of humans, it ain't happening. There are (on average) 16 new biotech drugs developed each year. Think about it for a minute. DNA discovered in 1953. Human Genome Project completes in 2003. Impact on humans... ???? I assume if we cured cancer I'd have heard about it. The wiki strongly hints the rules need to be changed for rubber to finally meet the road. And I'm sure there's plenty more problems but that is enough to start with. The common theme though is that these systems seem caught at a local maxima, which strongly hints that: A: There are intrinsic limits to growth, either locally or globally. B: Institutional frameworks are holding back further growth. Bad actors (politics) aside, I think most of the FDA wants to do the right thing. There is a strong vein of moral conviction that tends to be in the kind of people who join these sorts of organizations. At the same time this characteristic can retard change because it tends to be correlated with conservative traits. I suspect it is all about having the right incentives and some amount of bravery. In that case Jim O'Neill may be the right choice for Commissioner, Naturally the jackals are out in force but the articles I've been reading are merely resurgent tribalism (Ahhhh! Not a member of my tribe! Hello Gizmodo.) and not a serious critique. If anybody's interested in this subject there's a nice debate here that gives different perspectives: http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/fdas-caution-hazardous-our-health http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/fdas-caution-ha...