Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

From the frontmatter: >"A toast to the dead, for children with cancer and AIDS/ A cure exists, and you probably could have been saved."

I appreciate the can-do attitude of biohacking, but this is A. flatly wrong and B. a grave insult to every working pharma chemist.

from http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/04/15/swe...:

Looking someone in the eye and asking them if they really are accusing me of watching some of my family members die from diabetes, cancer, and heart disease while I was hiding the cures and collecting my paycheck is an uncomfortable conversation, but I’ve had it a few times.

The only counterattack has been that no, they’re not saying that I personally have these things in my desk drawer, it’s the higher-ups, you know, them.

“So how have I been working on these diseases for 25 years without rediscovering any of these cures?” I ask, and that generally winds things up. But I like to think (or to kid myself) that I’ve planted a slight seed of doubt.

You need as much conviction in your voice as the quacks have, though, and that’s not easy, because they have a lot. Science has the evidence on its side, naturally, and that’s a lot, but conspiracy theorists and their friends have something to believe in, and that’s a very strong part of human nature indeed.

Back in the 70's it was common knowledge that oil companies bought up patents for 100 mpg carburetors and buried them. I asked my dad (Air Force) about that. He laughed, and said the military had desperate fuel problems, and would not let any little ole' patents get in the way of getting their hardware running several times further on a tank of gas.

I didn't read that as a suggestion there's some secret AIDs vaccine kept locked away by big pharma, rather that many have died because of lack of access to the treatments that exist.

Yea I mean, it's part of a lyric from a song so it's debatable whether it's meant to be taken literally or if he just needed something that sorta rhymes:

A toast to the dead / For children with cancer and AIDS / A cure exists and you probably could've been saved / Sad to see medicine divorce morality / Corporate home-wreckers pimpin' up the salary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBNMhzn8VI

What about orphan drugs? It's true that more orphan drugs are being commercialized. But prices tend to be astronomical. Far better would be patent donation, and not-for-profit production.

Then nobody will make them. Their prices would be even more astronomical than they already are without the large subsidies they receive.

Plenty of people make money off generics. Even with lower market share you can charge slightly higher prices, but not too high or someone else will undercut. Today they have a monopoly.

That's because those generics have already been through the capital intensive process of getting FDA approval. The monopoly is intended to incentivize actually bringing the drug to market. I suppose there are countries without this process, but I also would wager they do not produce nearly as many new drugs (or new orphan drugs) proportionally to the US

An orphan drug is by definition a drug with no generics on the market.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug

An orphan drug is a pharmaceutical agent that has been developed specifically to treat a rare medical condition, the condition itself being referred to as an orphan disease.

A rare disease, also referred to as an "orphan disease", is any disease which affects a small percentage of the population. Most rare diseases are genetic

Well, I was mainly talking about orphan drugs that aren't yet commercialized. Once they're commercialized, they're still called orphan drugs, but maybe that should be "formerly orphan drugs" or whatever.

And yes, one of the incentives to encourage commercialization of orphan drugs is extended exclusivity.

That's why I said "not-for-profit" production. I mean, it's not like these drugs cost any more to manufacture than other drugs. It's that the patent holder seeks to recover their development cost on a much smaller sales volume.

Since it's a song quote here's a movie about the issue -

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1368443/

It's a strange argument that the people of have world have easy access to pharma.

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