america is so fucking based man
in any proper country that company at least gets forced to pay by the government then ordered to shut down forever due to wanton cruelty. all the employees get generous severance except whoever made that call. depending upon your view of carceral punishment there are a few ways to go with that guy.
I’m a researcher in the biological sciences at an institute which receives lots of government funding, and was at a university before my current position. We are not being paid to develop drugs. We are being paid to develop new knowledge that hopefully can be useful (in the broad sense of the term). Practically no one I’ve ever met during my time in academia is developing drugs, and the small few that were doing so were only researching a single, small part of a very long, complex process.
The R&D you are paying for is for us to typically find out that “Protein X interacts with Protein Y and causes Effect Z. When we delete Protein X then Effect Z goes away”. We might also find out that “Molecule Q can block the activity of Protein X, but has a host of issues that make it ineffective when given to Petri dish cells and mice.” This can give you a lead towards making a drug, but what we do is basically discover a possible starting point, nothing more. If someone wants to make a drug from this, they typically will start a company and get venture capital and angel investor money, as university labs are usually poorly equipped financially and talent wise to actually develop a drug (to speak nothing of pushing it through clinical trials). Transforming Molecule Q into a bona fide drug candidate is going to require a massive amount of work that most lay individuals are completely unaware of.
I’m really curious where this concept that the government is spending tons of money on drug R&D at publicly funded universities is coming from. It sounds great as a talking point, but from my perspective within the system it’s not quite how things work.
You know that the R in R&D stands for “research”, right? 🤦
Sounds a hell of a lot like that’s the kind of research that’s indispensable when formulating drugs.
Ya think? 🤦
Sounds like you’re doing all of the research and other legwork tbh. That’s hardly just “a starting point”.
You mean other than how you just confirmed it while trying to disprove it?
That being the perspective of living proof that you can be intelligent and simultaneously oblivious of the obvious.
Either way, pharmaceutical companies aren’t spending all their income on R&D. By far the biggest expense is advertising and after that, it’s stockholder dividends of the absolutely obscene profits they’re making on ripping off sick people.
Lol the guy said it himself: “I am a researcher” doesn’t understand there is an entire other part called development that also gets government funding. He works in the field and doesn’t realize that the pharmaceuticals companies “developing” drugs also get grants and tax breaks.