4 ms·

> Today, most pharmaceuticals are developed by the government. Private corporations take existing research and medicines, tweak them enough to be considered 'di

> Today, most pharmaceuticals are developed by the government. Private corporations take existing research and medicines, tweak them enough to be considered 'different', give them new names and then market them heavily to uncritical citizens, acting as parasites. [1][2] There is so much wrong with that sentence, but it's written with such conviction and confidence that I think this reply is probably a waste of my time. There is a huge amount of work, money and risk between government funded research highlighting a potential mechanism of action and actually getting a drug to patients. You can easily spend millions and years of work chasing down a promising project only to find out your drug doesn't work. Biology is really complex, most lay-people probably overestimate how much we actually understand. You can work decades in a pharmaceutical company and never see a project you worked on reach clinical trials, and even if you are lucky enough to get that far, it it has about a 10% chance of actually being approved. To say all that pharmaceutical companies are doing is stealing and monetizing government research is demonstrating a real lack of understanding of how drug discovery works. Source: worked in drug discovery for many years in both government funded academic labs and pharma.

thulecitizen 7y ago
It's difficult for me to say this, but despite your claims of working in labs, I believe you have been fully brainwashed. "The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing. Most of this marketing money is directed at the physicians who do the prescribing, rather than consumers. As Oliver pointed out, drug companies spent more than $3 billion a year marketing to consumers in the U.S. in 2012, but an estimated $24 billion marketing directly to health care professionals." The above is a direct quote from source 2 of my previous comment. Why do you claim there is "so much wrong with my sentence", and then come with "biology is complex"? Yes, I understand that it is complex, and that the work can be unrewarding as we fail our way forwards, towards a new discovery. This is why it is better to do this work in public and work together cooperatively, and not to have perverse incentives to privatize research and advancements [1][2]. Today the health and wellbeing of the American public is often hindered and held back by patents and IP. Private R&D is crap, and public funding gets an insanely bad wrap in the USA. Again, as was my concern with the OP, where are your sources/research? Are you really claiming that academic paywalls and the perverse incentives mentioned above are the sustainable way forward? I appreciate your work if it is true that you worked in labs, but I disagree with your economic argument. The consumer money thrown at corporations in the form of rent on corporate IP (pharmaceutical products) [3], could instead be spent by the government on more public research and development. I think the real question underlying all this is: are you allergic to tax and government? Maybe you prefer the term crowdfunding instead of tax? That term works for me too if it gets the message across. Maybe we can also use the word intrapreneur instead of public servant? With our new words, the question I am interested in is: is it proven fact that pharmaceutical development is better off being crowdfunded by 330 million Americans (or instead of 'Americans' we can call them 'investors’?)[4]? Please could you tell me if you actually read the article attached to this thread? It has pretty much the same arguments that I laid out about above. Please tell me if I am misrepresenting something. The reason I am reacting strongly and pushing back on your tiresome argument is because the US seems to be the only industrialized country where people die because they cannot afford their prescription drugs, because of extortionate corporate prices, while other countries don't have this [5][6]. I'm trying to understand what underlying ideology makes these ludicrous policies and systems possible. Why not innovate on sustainable business models and partnerships, instead of focusing on better IP protections and other rent-seeking apparatus? [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/barriers-to-scientific-research-are-holding-back-innovation/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/barriers-t... [2] https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... [3][4] "A tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created ... Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks ... Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks ... Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States" https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru... [5] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-healthcare-medical-costs https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he... [6] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/oct/26/michaelmoore.documentary https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/oct/26/michaelmoore.do...
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  If it is simple as copying from the government, then why aren't you doing it too? Why not take the existing medicine and resell it to the public for half of what everyone else is charging? You would simultaneously be making a fortune, while at the same time being called a hero.
  - thulecitizen 7y ago
    I’m arguing that they are creating an IP/patent war-chest and slowly but surely creating a fatal monopoly. I’m saying corporations are abusing our common inheritance by plundering the commons and not contributing back to it. “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. “ — Aaron Swartz Big Pharma is standing on the shoulders of giants, but are biting the hand that fed them. We have much shared wealth, but without open or public access, and cooperative business models that steward and keep a healthy commons alive, the trend towards extortion of the lower and middle classes of America by Corporations (through rent from IP) will keep increasing, as well as US brutality towards the Global South, in trying to upkeep the US-led Global North Imperial IP regime [1]. In that future, the class divide will keep growing and many more people will continue to suffer. In the end, without sharing and socializing progress, we run the risk of the Precariat taking down the systems completely, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I believe our ideal future lies in something described as Protocol Cooperativism, using distributed technologies like Ceptr and Holochain. I would also like to see an unenclosed p2p intellectual property system that honors authorship, yet allows access for all [1]. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/76166b6a-03ca-11e2-9322-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/76166b6a-03ca-11e2-9322-00144feab... or https://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/GENPRESS/F120923B.pdf https://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/GENPRESS/F... [2] https://vimeo.com/50481436 https://vimeo.com/50481436

thulecitizen 7y ago

It's difficult for me to say this, but despite your claims of working in labs, I believe you have been fully brainwashed. "The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing. Most of this marketing money is directed at the physicians who do the prescribing, rather than consumers. As Oliver pointed out, drug companies spent more than $3 billion a year marketing to consumers in the U.S. in 2012, but an estimated $24 billion marketing directly to health care professionals." The above is a direct quote from source 2 of my previous comment. Why do you claim there is "so much wrong with my sentence", and then come with "biology is complex"? Yes, I understand that it is complex, and that the work can be unrewarding as we fail our way forwards, towards a new discovery. This is why it is better to do this work in public and work together cooperatively, and not to have perverse incentives to privatize research and advancements [1][2]. Today the health and wellbeing of the American public is often hindered and held back by patents and IP. Private R&D is crap, and public funding gets an insanely bad wrap in the USA. Again, as was my concern with the OP, where are your sources/research? Are you really claiming that academic paywalls and the perverse incentives mentioned above are the sustainable way forward? I appreciate your work if it is true that you worked in labs, but I disagree with your economic argument. The consumer money thrown at corporations in the form of rent on corporate IP (pharmaceutical products) [3], could instead be spent by the government on more public research and development. I think the real question underlying all this is: are you allergic to tax and government? Maybe you prefer the term crowdfunding instead of tax? That term works for me too if it gets the message across. Maybe we can also use the word intrapreneur instead of public servant? With our new words, the question I am interested in is: is it proven fact that pharmaceutical development is better off being crowdfunded by 330 million Americans (or instead of 'Americans' we can call them 'investors’?)[4]? Please could you tell me if you actually read the article attached to this thread? It has pretty much the same arguments that I laid out about above. Please tell me if I am misrepresenting something. The reason I am reacting strongly and pushing back on your tiresome argument is because the US seems to be the only industrialized country where people die because they cannot afford their prescription drugs, because of extortionate corporate prices, while other countries don't have this [5][6]. I'm trying to understand what underlying ideology makes these ludicrous policies and systems possible. Why not innovate on sustainable business models and partnerships, instead of focusing on better IP protections and other rent-seeking apparatus? [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/barriers-to-scientific-research-are-holding-back-innovation/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/barriers-t... [2] https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... [3][4] "A tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created ... Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks ... Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks ... Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States" https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru... [5] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-healthcare-medical-costs https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he... [6] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/oct/26/michaelmoore.documentary https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/oct/26/michaelmoore.do...

GreenJelloShot 7y ago
If it is simple as copying from the government, then why aren't you doing it too? Why not take the existing medicine and resell it to the public for half of what everyone else is charging? You would simultaneously be making a fortune, while at the same time being called a hero.
- thulecitizen 7y ago
  I’m arguing that they are creating an IP/patent war-chest and slowly but surely creating a fatal monopoly. I’m saying corporations are abusing our common inheritance by plundering the commons and not contributing back to it. “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. “ — Aaron Swartz Big Pharma is standing on the shoulders of giants, but are biting the hand that fed them. We have much shared wealth, but without open or public access, and cooperative business models that steward and keep a healthy commons alive, the trend towards extortion of the lower and middle classes of America by Corporations (through rent from IP) will keep increasing, as well as US brutality towards the Global South, in trying to upkeep the US-led Global North Imperial IP regime [1]. In that future, the class divide will keep growing and many more people will continue to suffer. In the end, without sharing and socializing progress, we run the risk of the Precariat taking down the systems completely, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I believe our ideal future lies in something described as Protocol Cooperativism, using distributed technologies like Ceptr and Holochain. I would also like to see an unenclosed p2p intellectual property system that honors authorship, yet allows access for all [1]. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/76166b6a-03ca-11e2-9322-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/76166b6a-03ca-11e2-9322-00144feab... or https://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/GENPRESS/F120923B.pdf https://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/GENPRESS/F... [2] https://vimeo.com/50481436 https://vimeo.com/50481436