5 ms·

My experience is that many prominent professors behave in a monopolistic way. That is, they try to sabotage theses, grant applications and publications in revie

by nextos 4y ago

My experience is that many prominent professors behave in a monopolistic way. That is, they try to sabotage theses, grant applications and publications in review that go against their own research. Lots of different areas, particularly in medicine, have slowed down or stagnated as a consequence of this. For example, the connection between immunity and cancer was obvious in the 1990s but it took many uphill battles to get funding for immunotherapies. Proponents of somatic mutations as a cause of cancer have typically taken most of the research funds and blocked alternative ideas. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, T1D, etc. have pretty similar stories. Luckily less politically driven funding agencies and, ultimately, VCs are introducing some efficiency back into the system.

forum_ghost 4y ago
...but VC and private equity funding for biotech has been available in the 90s too?
- nextos 4y ago
  It was an order of magnitude more difficult to raise VC money for biotech back then. These days you can even raise a seed with no experimental data. That was extraordinarily unusual even well into the 2000s. There are articles around discussing how in case of Alzheimer's it was impossible to get VC funding for immune ideas, even though they already had interesting evidence. The same cabal was also blocking them. I think you need to be an insider to realize how incredibly political most research in medicine is.
  - throwaway5752 4y ago
    I have to ask, do you have experience in this area? Because it doesn't agree with my limited experience and I'm curious when/where you were involved with biotech startups and funding in the 90s/early 00s.
    - openknot 4y ago
      I'm an outsider, but to quote credible external sources, Science AAAS writer Derek Lowe documented that the biotech startup scene was large and relatively easier to get investments in from 1991 to 1994, with stagnation in 2012 [0]. McKinsey separately reported that there has since been another boom in the biotech sector in the 2020s [1]. [0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biotech-class-early-90s https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biotech-class-earl... [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/whats-ahead-for-biotech-another-wave-or-low-tide https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insigh...
      - killjoywashere 4y ago
        > boom in the biotech sector in the 2020s Thanks, McKinsey, that's a great use of your consulting superpowers. Hey, was there a boom in artificial intelligence around 2015 as well? For $65,000 an hour, I'm sure you'll be happy to tell us.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      I was in grad school at that time, in a program that heavily emphasized bio-entrepneurship. It was not easy to get money to start a biotech company at the time. The only ones I can recall required a star professor, a working technology, a university patent, and even then, most of them failed or pivoted.
  - forum_ghost 4y ago
    these days as in this decade, or right now? Apparently VCs are clamping down on loose funding in the current climate, or thats not the case in biotech?
marricks 4y ago
Thank god VC's aren't monopolistic or driven towards short terms solutions for quick profits.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  Correct. The problem with existing research is that it simply isn't that open to new ideas, particularly once funding streams are in place (because shifts in funding mean job losses, institutional impacts etc). As you are pointing out, VC's often see monpolies as something to disrupt. So you'll take the taxi industry for example. A govt sanctioned monpoly with horrible service and low insurance limits. They'll make a play with something like uber. Hotels -> airbnb / VRBO And the list goes on. You point out how VC's don't focus on short term profits. While I would agree, some however would argue that VC's should focus MORE on short term profits. I personally think too many money losing businesses are subsidized for way too long with VC money. In biotech that may be a good or necessary thing, but personally think this longer view is a bit of a negative.
  - marricks 4y ago
    My comment was extremely flippant. Let me provide an example to explain my point of view. Cancer research can appear very stagnant. Pharma companies and researchers funnel money into existing solutions and combinations of existing solutions which increase life expectancy by a few months, and quality of life by a few degrees. Not much foundational research on cures, and why should there be when every new drug which leads to slightly better outcome will be purchased by patients who will do anything to live a bit longer? Now, how in the hell would VC be expected to improve that landscape? The ideal solution is a cheap therapy which cures cancer. Maybe a cancer vaccine. Where's the money in a 50 (or even 1k) tailored vaccine to cure a cancer when a slightly new combination of cancer drugs can cost $50,000 a month for the rest of the life of a patient? I'd argue VC don't think long term for the benefit of anyone except themselves. They'll invest in a moonshot if it disrupts an industry for their benefit (e.g puts all taxi drivers out of work) but not if it eliminates an industry (e.g cancer research). There's way more money in funding a slightly different cancer drug.
throwawaymaths 4y ago
I was lucky enough to witness the sea change in a relatively intellectually honest amyloid lab in the 2003-2009 regime. We were actively pursuing results in the amyloid hypothesis but just about every other lab meeting we were careful to mention that the hypothesis might be wrong. All of our papers say "suspected"... Around the end of that period we were getting word that the first attempt at a drug targeting amyloids was failing, and it was a common morbid joke among all of us that this was all a red herring. ~15 years ain't so bad for the skepticism to make its way out of insider speculation to relatively well accepted (drug trials take a long time). I don't have a skin in the game with the hypothesis (I'm actually biased against it) but it is worth noting that most of the drugs tried are antibodies, which introduces the confounding factor that all antibodies elicit an inflammatory oxidative response by locally catalyzing the conversion of oxygen to ozone (oxidative inflammation is thought to also be causal to Alzheimer's), so before we completely shut the book on it we might want to control for that. VCs are clueless, but at least they are results-driven in a relatively neutral way, though they are going to be biased toward initial selection of idiotic investments. (You pick to fund something because it's a friend of a friend, a referral, social validation, etc.)
- meowface 4y ago
  These are the kinds of replies that still make HN one of the best comment sections on the internet, if looking at peaks. (The average is not great, but there's huge variance.)
- ramraj07 4y ago
  > most of the drugs tried are antibodies But not all of them right? So what exact merit does the statement hold? I also did my PhD in a lab that rabidly believed in a hypothesis against all emerging data (it only didn’t matter that much because it was obscure). Even when my colleagues literally disproved the hypothesis my PIs undermined it while writing the paper with globs of ambiguity (just like you mentioned) and buried the result in Figure 5 instead of Figure 1, and made him never submit it to any prominent journal. All because this result made it look like they were idiots for 20 years for blindly believing a hypothesis with zero actual data. (If interested the hypothesis being IgG gets degraded in endothelial cells and that’s where the protein that salvages them works). I’ve had front row seats for blinded belief in what you used to believe being what drives your science and focus. I am not yet prepared to forgive any lab that actually measurably put millions at misery because of it.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
> less politically driven funding agencies what agencies are more free from politicians manipulating their funding? (this sounds hopeful)
- nextos 4y ago
  I was referring to academic politics. That is, professors steering funding to their niches and trying to dry out alternative ideas. I think DARPA and other agencies trying to imitate them (e.g. Wellcome Leap) are less prone to manipulation and much more fact-driven. Howard Hughes Medical Institute is also good. As a European, I hate ERC. In some cases, they have not even bothered to discontinue funding principal investigators known to have committed fraud and who had to retract major publications.
rob_c 4y ago
Well thankfully I can say I've not come across this level of narrow thinking in physics or computing. Normally there's excitement when the research offers some weird or novel tie in or a better way of doing a thing or solving a problem. But then again these fields don't have the same structure of paymaster.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  I think this is being seen in particle physics right now, with CERN campaigning to fund a successor to the LHC that other particle physicists believe has little chance of finding anything new.
  - rob_c 4y ago
    I can't name of a global bio experiment looking for international funding to build a massive project. This unfortunately isn't the case. There is friction because there is a fork in the road for particle physics. If we build or extend the LHC it is fundamentally a p-p hadron collider collider. There is significant new evidence of new physics in hadron/lepton interactions and from the neutrino sector. Neutrinos are tricky but we feel we have a handle on these, which is pushing more people to want to build a large clean lepton collider either an e-e or u-u collider. The problem with a purely leptop collider is that it doesn't tell us too much about hadron physics (hence why the lhc differs so much from Tevatron). The community itself has elected those who are in charge to review the proposals from the people with different ideas to allow us to form a coherent argument to go to funding councils/countries with. I cannot name any other academic field which has managed to achieve such a level of international self-governence when designing projects on such a scale.
- dzdt 4y ago
  > I've not come across this level of narrow thinking in physics String theory?
  - rob_c 4y ago
    hurhurhur big think... string theory has at the very least given useful tools for particle and field theory as a research area, saying this doesn't work is like complaining that I can't take home a jar of magnons to show someone besides there's tonnes of theory people I know who work on completely unrelated theory problems and ways of working that predate or have come after the dawn of string-theory, complaining this hasn't panned out into M-thoery is to a point of almost being absurdist
RappingBoomer 4y ago
this sort of stifling is actually the story of science, which really does advance only through funerals
hoseja 4y ago
But, somatic mutations are still the cause, it's just most of the time the immune system gets rid of the mutant cells.

by nextos 4y ago

forum_ghost 4y ago

...but VC and private equity funding for biotech has been available in the 90s too?

nextos 4y ago
It was an order of magnitude more difficult to raise VC money for biotech back then. These days you can even raise a seed with no experimental data. That was extraordinarily unusual even well into the 2000s. There are articles around discussing how in case of Alzheimer's it was impossible to get VC funding for immune ideas, even though they already had interesting evidence. The same cabal was also blocking them. I think you need to be an insider to realize how incredibly political most research in medicine is.
- throwaway5752 4y ago
  I have to ask, do you have experience in this area? Because it doesn't agree with my limited experience and I'm curious when/where you were involved with biotech startups and funding in the 90s/early 00s.
  - openknot 4y ago
    I'm an outsider, but to quote credible external sources, Science AAAS writer Derek Lowe documented that the biotech startup scene was large and relatively easier to get investments in from 1991 to 1994, with stagnation in 2012 [0]. McKinsey separately reported that there has since been another boom in the biotech sector in the 2020s [1]. [0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biotech-class-early-90s https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biotech-class-earl... [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/whats-ahead-for-biotech-another-wave-or-low-tide https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insigh...
    - killjoywashere 4y ago
      > boom in the biotech sector in the 2020s Thanks, McKinsey, that's a great use of your consulting superpowers. Hey, was there a boom in artificial intelligence around 2015 as well? For $65,000 an hour, I'm sure you'll be happy to tell us.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I was in grad school at that time, in a program that heavily emphasized bio-entrepneurship. It was not easy to get money to start a biotech company at the time. The only ones I can recall required a star professor, a working technology, a university patent, and even then, most of them failed or pivoted.
- forum_ghost 4y ago
  these days as in this decade, or right now? Apparently VCs are clamping down on loose funding in the current climate, or thats not the case in biotech?

marricks 4y ago

Thank god VC's aren't monopolistic or driven towards short terms solutions for quick profits.

onphonenow 4y ago
Correct. The problem with existing research is that it simply isn't that open to new ideas, particularly once funding streams are in place (because shifts in funding mean job losses, institutional impacts etc). As you are pointing out, VC's often see monpolies as something to disrupt. So you'll take the taxi industry for example. A govt sanctioned monpoly with horrible service and low insurance limits. They'll make a play with something like uber. Hotels -> airbnb / VRBO And the list goes on. You point out how VC's don't focus on short term profits. While I would agree, some however would argue that VC's should focus MORE on short term profits. I personally think too many money losing businesses are subsidized for way too long with VC money. In biotech that may be a good or necessary thing, but personally think this longer view is a bit of a negative.
- marricks 4y ago
  My comment was extremely flippant. Let me provide an example to explain my point of view. Cancer research can appear very stagnant. Pharma companies and researchers funnel money into existing solutions and combinations of existing solutions which increase life expectancy by a few months, and quality of life by a few degrees. Not much foundational research on cures, and why should there be when every new drug which leads to slightly better outcome will be purchased by patients who will do anything to live a bit longer? Now, how in the hell would VC be expected to improve that landscape? The ideal solution is a cheap therapy which cures cancer. Maybe a cancer vaccine. Where's the money in a 50 (or even 1k) tailored vaccine to cure a cancer when a slightly new combination of cancer drugs can cost $50,000 a month for the rest of the life of a patient? I'd argue VC don't think long term for the benefit of anyone except themselves. They'll invest in a moonshot if it disrupts an industry for their benefit (e.g puts all taxi drivers out of work) but not if it eliminates an industry (e.g cancer research). There's way more money in funding a slightly different cancer drug.

throwawaymaths 4y ago

I was lucky enough to witness the sea change in a relatively intellectually honest amyloid lab in the 2003-2009 regime. We were actively pursuing results in the amyloid hypothesis but just about every other lab meeting we were careful to mention that the hypothesis might be wrong. All of our papers say "suspected"... Around the end of that period we were getting word that the first attempt at a drug targeting amyloids was failing, and it was a common morbid joke among all of us that this was all a red herring. ~15 years ain't so bad for the skepticism to make its way out of insider speculation to relatively well accepted (drug trials take a long time). I don't have a skin in the game with the hypothesis (I'm actually biased against it) but it is worth noting that most of the drugs tried are antibodies, which introduces the confounding factor that all antibodies elicit an inflammatory oxidative response by locally catalyzing the conversion of oxygen to ozone (oxidative inflammation is thought to also be causal to Alzheimer's), so before we completely shut the book on it we might want to control for that. VCs are clueless, but at least they are results-driven in a relatively neutral way, though they are going to be biased toward initial selection of idiotic investments. (You pick to fund something because it's a friend of a friend, a referral, social validation, etc.)

meowface 4y ago
These are the kinds of replies that still make HN one of the best comment sections on the internet, if looking at peaks. (The average is not great, but there's huge variance.)
ramraj07 4y ago
> most of the drugs tried are antibodies But not all of them right? So what exact merit does the statement hold? I also did my PhD in a lab that rabidly believed in a hypothesis against all emerging data (it only didn’t matter that much because it was obscure). Even when my colleagues literally disproved the hypothesis my PIs undermined it while writing the paper with globs of ambiguity (just like you mentioned) and buried the result in Figure 5 instead of Figure 1, and made him never submit it to any prominent journal. All because this result made it look like they were idiots for 20 years for blindly believing a hypothesis with zero actual data. (If interested the hypothesis being IgG gets degraded in endothelial cells and that’s where the protein that salvages them works). I’ve had front row seats for blinded belief in what you used to believe being what drives your science and focus. I am not yet prepared to forgive any lab that actually measurably put millions at misery because of it.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

> less politically driven funding agencies what agencies are more free from politicians manipulating their funding? (this sounds hopeful)

nextos 4y ago
I was referring to academic politics. That is, professors steering funding to their niches and trying to dry out alternative ideas. I think DARPA and other agencies trying to imitate them (e.g. Wellcome Leap) are less prone to manipulation and much more fact-driven. Howard Hughes Medical Institute is also good. As a European, I hate ERC. In some cases, they have not even bothered to discontinue funding principal investigators known to have committed fraud and who had to retract major publications.

rob_c 4y ago

Well thankfully I can say I've not come across this level of narrow thinking in physics or computing. Normally there's excitement when the research offers some weird or novel tie in or a better way of doing a thing or solving a problem. But then again these fields don't have the same structure of paymaster.

tsimionescu 4y ago
I think this is being seen in particle physics right now, with CERN campaigning to fund a successor to the LHC that other particle physicists believe has little chance of finding anything new.
- rob_c 4y ago
  I can't name of a global bio experiment looking for international funding to build a massive project. This unfortunately isn't the case. There is friction because there is a fork in the road for particle physics. If we build or extend the LHC it is fundamentally a p-p hadron collider collider. There is significant new evidence of new physics in hadron/lepton interactions and from the neutrino sector. Neutrinos are tricky but we feel we have a handle on these, which is pushing more people to want to build a large clean lepton collider either an e-e or u-u collider. The problem with a purely leptop collider is that it doesn't tell us too much about hadron physics (hence why the lhc differs so much from Tevatron). The community itself has elected those who are in charge to review the proposals from the people with different ideas to allow us to form a coherent argument to go to funding councils/countries with. I cannot name any other academic field which has managed to achieve such a level of international self-governence when designing projects on such a scale.
dzdt 4y ago
> I've not come across this level of narrow thinking in physics String theory?
- rob_c 4y ago
  hurhurhur big think... string theory has at the very least given useful tools for particle and field theory as a research area, saying this doesn't work is like complaining that I can't take home a jar of magnons to show someone besides there's tonnes of theory people I know who work on completely unrelated theory problems and ways of working that predate or have come after the dawn of string-theory, complaining this hasn't panned out into M-thoery is to a point of almost being absurdist

RappingBoomer 4y ago

this sort of stifling is actually the story of science, which really does advance only through funerals

hoseja 4y ago

But, somatic mutations are still the cause, it's just most of the time the immune system gets rid of the mutant cells.