3 ms·
I mean this in the best faith, but I feel this is still sidestepping the core issue: foundational science and applied development are just not fungible. The kin
by z2 1y ago
I mean this in the best faith, but I feel this is still sidestepping the core issue: foundational science and applied development are just not fungible. The kind of research NIH funds: long-horizon, high-risk, mechanism-level discovery, is not something corporations will just pick up the tab on if public funding disappears and is very different from the also decades long drug pipeline. Not because they’re incapable or unwilling, but because it’s economically irrational within the incentive structure today. Of course big pharma companies have money, they will figure things out and maybe even spend more funding on basic science. But very few shareholder-driven companies are going to fund a 10-year exploration into, say, the epigenetic triggers of cancer with no guarantee of a product at the end. They might take safer steps and invest in foundational research tangential to existing targets, and yes, this does launch a whole other debate on efficiency of this vs NIH moonshot research.
Yes, they do some early-stage R&D work, but it’s almost almost always downstream of publicly funded breakthroughs. They build on what’s already been de-risked. NIH isn’t just 8% of the money, it’s the first 8%, the part no one else wants to touch because it’s too uncertain, too slow, and too unprofitable in the intermediate term. Trials are expensive, that's where 80% of R&D today goes.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1715368115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1715368115
- db48x 1y ago> The kind of research NIH funds: long-horizon, high-risk, mechanism-level discovery, is not something corporations will just pick up the tab on… Except that there are plenty of counterexamples to that idea. Bell Labs employed thousands of researchers and they made many foundational discoveries alongside the thousands of inventions that were merely development of the existing phone system. The list of foundational discoveries made there is so long that is hard to imagine. Just off the top of my head it includes the transistor, the integrated circuit, the operating system, lasers, fiber optics, CCDs, solar cells, etc, etc. Nyquist and Shannon worked there and discovered the mathematical foundations of information theory, including entropy, bits, communication channel capacity, etc, etc. They were ridiculously productive and fantastically profitable, but these days with taxpayers funding research most corporations don’t bother any more. The articles you link to have much to say about how research is currently done, but do not even purport to say that this is the only way it could ever be done.
- z2 1y agoAgree, and I have no idea what's the optimal way for research to be done. My claim is that the way research is done today works for fairly small impact on taxpayer burden, and without natural experiments with other countries with spending of a similar scale to the US, it will be difficult to see which mode is best. Bell Labs was amazing, but it also was funded in large by profits from an emboldened AT&T with monopoly power. Is monopolistic profit funding more efficient than taxpayer funding? No idea.
- db48x 1y agoRegardless of inflation, AT&T made way less money in the 20s than any pharmaceutical company does today. If they could afford the research budget back then, then the pharmaceutical companies of today can too. It had nothing to do with them being a monopoly.