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The missing bit of this story is that governments have two ways to promote the development of new drugs and can run both in parallel. First is by passing paten
by alan-crowe 17y ago
The missing bit of this story is that governments have two ways to promote the development of new drugs and can run both in parallel.
First is by passing patent laws. The attractive property here is that the government is not paying out on research that fails. Private business does that and has to suck up the losses. The other side of this coin is the big "windfall" from monopoly profits when the research succeeds. What seems like a shrewd incentive scheme ex ante, seems immoral ex post.
The second way is by funding research in national laboratories out of general taxation. The problem is that the government keeps paying for research that fails, and since success is rare the process is hard to manage. At what point does the government admit that a research institution has lost its focus and should be closed?
This second way raises awkward questions. Having worked in government funded research myself I'm painfully aware of how easy it is to persuade one-self of the merits of long term research over short term research to the extent that one wanders off into the wilderness and never achieves anything. The profit motive is one way of countering this tendency. Are there other ways? They need to work better than the profit motive, but that is setting the bar pretty low.
I think Ben Goldacre could better spend his time talking about the psychology of being a researcher. The second route is seen by many as a money-pit, but there is much new thinking on Public Choice Theory and Mechanism Design. Are we not ripe for some new and better ways of running publicly funded research? If we never get round to thinking about these issues, then the mocking title of "Please give us all your money" also works well as an attack on publicly funded science.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoOne of the things we find in startups is that people consistently confuse ideas with executing the ideas to make real change. An idea is that drug X does well in vitro under certain conditions. Real change is a development, certification, marketing, sales, and accounting system that lets drug X actually help people. Ideas are cheap. Execution is tough. I might have a drug that cures cancer, but if I can't prove it, if I can't get funding, if I can't get certification, if I can make the drug, warehouse it, distribute it, etc -- it's just an idea. This is why the argument does not work against general science. General science is all about ideas -- that's all there is. Making drugs is about delivering solutions to people. They're two different things.
- blogimus 17y agoI agree they are two different things. It sounds like you are talking about illustrates the dichotomy of fundamental versus applied research. In articles and discussions I read and hear on research and funding, I see a general lack of acknowledgment that we have different research models. Different research models pose different incentives. To oversimplify and generalize a lot here, I'll describe my understanding of one model, The fundamental to applied research chain, Fundamental research is discovery, to evolve vague notions into concrete ideas and data. It is a broad, generally undirected investigation into some phenomena. Applied research, on the other hand, takes the concrete ideas and data (knowledge) gained from fundamental research and turn them into tangible products (physical such as medicine and virtual, such as search engines). With fundamental research, we get ideas, but not products. With applied research, we get products from ideas. Without fundamental research, there can be no applied research. Without applied research, we get no products. Yes, that is a broad generalization and disregards the true overlap of different research techniques, but I think breaking things out like this can help discover better models and financial motivations for research. To me, it seems that the public sector is more naturally suited toward fundamental research and the private sector is more naturally suited to applied research.
- smanek 17y ago'A scientist is a machine for turning money into ideas. An engineer is a machine for turning ideas into money'
- nfnaaron 17y ago"governments have two ways to promote the development of new drugs and can run both in parallel. First is by passing patent laws. The second way is by funding research in national laboratories." What if the government laboratories did their research under the direction of private business? This would reduce the risk of govt labs wandering into the wilderness, offload some of the risk from business, and could provide society with a stake and return in the outcome, expressed in lower prices or wider manufacturing rights or whatever.
- anamax 17y ago> What if the government laboratories did their research under the direction of private business? How about not? If you're worried about dumb spending by govt, this won't solve it. If the likely value is too low for a company that would get all of the benefit, it's certainly too low for a govt that gets less of the benefit.
- billswift 17y agoThere is a third way, buy out the patent on useful drugs that the gov't wants to encourage.