--- Alberto Monteiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > And now for something completely different: those > _vampires_ > that control medical research are not interested in > finding cures > for any disease, they are just pumping money into > expensive > drugs that make _any_ disease a cronical disease.
This explains why Bayer invested hundreds of millions to develop cipro, I guess. While there are certainly financial incentives that lead them to prefer making things into chronic diseases, they end up with chronic diseases because the science goes that way. I'm curious, actually, as to what disease exactly you're referring to. AIDS? You go ahead and cure AIDS, then, Alberto, and then come back to me and tell me how the "vampire" pharmacos didn't do anything to cure it, if it's so easy. Meanwhile, I'll be thankful for the fact that those "vampires", to little thanks and less profit, invested billions of dollars of money and countless hours of time from some of the finest doctors in the world to change AIDS into a disease where, if you get it in the West, the odds are you will die of something else. That's one of the most remarkable achievements in medical history. As a purely rational advisor to the industry, I would tell them it was the dumbest mistake they ever made, though. Any pharmaco that invested in AIDS research and got a success out of it got _screwed_. I would use a harsher word, but I know how it bothers John. They took enormous publicity hits, and then were forced to sell it at a very low price. From a business standpoint, any pharmaco that invested in AIDS twenty years ago made a mistake. Any pharmaco that did it today would have to be run by idiots or saints, and the reason why is precisely the attitudes you describe. > They are more evil than the Cocaine Cartel of > Medellin: at least > we can say, in favour of the cocaine barons, that > those that > take cocaine are not _forced_ to take it in the > first place. You're not _forced by the pharmaco_ to take the drug. What they manage to do is spend enormous resources and time to produce products that, if you take them, will make your life better. Let's all circle around and damn them for that, certainly. > > Medical research should never be allowed to be > controlled > by private companies. If there is any reason to > fight Capitalism > and sponsor Communism, those Drug Dealers are number > one in my list. How many drugs did the Soviet Union invent, again? Can you name _even one_? I'll stack the odds in your favor and give you every Communist country in the world - the USSR, China, all of Eastern Europe, and everyone else combined - and say that all of them together have done less for drug development than Merck, all by itself. You can also add in every drug developed by J&J, Pfizer, Glaxo, AstraZeneca, ScheringPlough, Novartis, Aventis, and every single biotech, just to cap things off. > > I imagine that history will > > judge the people who made that happen very harshly > > indeed, actually. > > > I imagine that History will be amazed at the > passivity > of the early XXIers, who allowed the Drug Barons to > monopolize their lifes forever. > > Alberto Monteiro Not if historians know anything about the industry. Now, odds are they won't. But if you do, you know that drug creation is split into two parts - research and development. Research consists basically of finding targets. It's quite difficult. Governments do it quite well, pharmacos have historically done it well but are having less success at the moment. The other part is development. It's _very_ difficult. That is taking the target research has found, crafting a molecule to address it, running it through clinical trials, altering the molecule to increase efficacy and decrease toxicity, running it through clinical trials again, developing a delivery system to consistently get it to the appropriate organ, running it through _more_ clinical trials, finally releasing it to the public after FDA approval, and then conducting _still more_ clinical trials to make sure that it's safe for even the rarest of populations. Governments can't do that worth shit. There's no one outside the industry who has the skills in pharmacological chemistry (to pick one skill among many) to do those things. History will, I think, most likely be amazed at the foolishness of governments that decided to sacrifice all future innovation and new drug development in order to get questionable savings on current products. You don't want to pay pharmaco prices? Fine, but then you should never take any drug that comes onto the market after today, no matter what the reason. Otherwise you're just a parasite, free riding on the people who do pay for those drugs to be created. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
