Stanford has a set of awesome podcasts called Entrepreneurial thought leaders (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.ht

Stanford has a set of awesome podcasts called Entrepreneurial thought leaders (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html). One of the more recent ones was from a serial entrepreneur in the medial space. He said the reason that drugs take so long to produce is the FDA process. Now the FDA is housed by smart people but you have to look at it from their prespective. They can accept or reject drugs. If they reject a drug then there is no serious problem that can come back and bite them. If they accept a drug, there is no real upside to them. They get no bonus for accepting the drug, however if the drug turns out to actually harm people then they are squarely in the cross hairs. This leads to the question of why would the FDA accept any drug without being 100% sure, and with medicine there is no such thing as 100% sure.