Russell, On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 10:35 PM, Russell Wallace <[email protected] > wrote:
> I think I would reason as follows: these days drug companies face almost > terminally crippling costs testing candidate drugs. Leaving aside the > political component to this, a large part of the technical component is > that each test gives you so little information. If we had better monitoring > of what's actually going on in the brains of the subjects of a drug test, > that could be worth an awful lot of money. Might the drugs industry be a > possible source of funding on that basis? > I like your always-fresh ways of looking at things. The challenge here is that you can't diagram LIVE brains, just dead ones that are pureed in the process. Further, drugs tend to make subtle changes in characteristics that do NOT affect the diagram, so I suspect that selling it to the drug people would be a really hard sell. My proposal leverages from what is known in UV microscopy, but even that is falling into disuse under the onslaught of drug-related genetic "research". A bit more explanation. My friend and former employer John is both the Chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery and is the Director of Research at a major university medical center, so he is right at Ground Zero in all this. OK, so I was stupid enough to think that I could discuss how research was being misdirected by the drug companies controlling the Department of Health, but I quickly discovered that I was "preaching to the choir". He can't get ANY funding for the things he personally sees as critical to health care right now, let alone projects like mine with more distant payoffs. He is still an active neurosurgeon and is now forced to operate on patients who clearly need better procedures than anything he presently knows to do (most operations of all kinds are "cook book" procedures), but he can't even free up any "loose change" to do the little research needed to save his own patient's lives!!! "Take a walk down the halls and look around. Those shielded laboratories with their copper curtains that you used to work in are now all wasted doing genetic research, and as the Director of Research I can't do a thing about it." John Hopefully you can see my point here. John is on MY side, is MUCH better positioned to affect this disaster, yet he is completely powerless. If even he, as a Director of Research at a major university's medical center, can't do anything, what chance do I as an outsider have? I believe that genetic research for drug use is its own "bubble" that will soon pop. One of the 20 repeating threads at WORLDCOMP (coming on June 16-19 in Las Vegas) is the point where genetic research intersects with computer science, so I have had plenty of opportunity to talk about what I see is the misdirection of genetic research with them. I expected strong opposition, but found general agreement. Most understand that most illnesses are NOT of genetic origin and there won't be many genetic cures, but they work in this field because that is where the money now is, as those who have specialized in other areas of health-related research are for the most part unemployed. It seems to me to just be a matter of time until the drug companies figure out that there just isn't much value in this research, and abandon all but the most promising avenues of research. There still seems to be plenty that genetic research can do for cancer, but the other areas will simply die from lack of progress. When this bubble bursts there is going to be a bloodbath in health-related research. My crystal ball isn't clear enough to tell me what (if any) bubble will come next. Perhaps it will be tissue diagramming. 8-:D> Steve ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
