This is the same Gilead Sciences that developed a cure for Hepatitis C, but was crucified in the press because of the high upfront cost.
I want pharma to makes lots of money so they care hire lots of smart people. I want developing cures for viruses and diseases to be at least as a good a career path for smart kids in the future as working for a Silicon Valley company writing the next chat app or developing the next advertising platform.
Creating cures for diseases is a systemically complex problem and it's not clear that "more smart people" really is the answer, versus "do a better job". In many ways, the smartest folks in the room are the least capable at moving drug discovery forward- smart people want to work on cool new problems, explore nifty theories, but don't want to deal with the day-to-day challenges of reliably identifying new drugs.
I left drug discovery because the systemic challenges were too great; it's not like you can be smart or work hard and solve a problem. You have to play a very long game, do a bunch of tedious and boring things, and master politics to get a drug to market.
One thing to note is that some drugs really do cost a lot to R&D and to manufacture, and I think those drugs should reflect those costs; but many companies overprice their drugs to maintain absurdly high profit margins. That doesnt' translate into larger investments in future drugs.
Gilead has been very good at this, but after working for a biotech startup that had a deal with Gilead to work on NASH, I've become extremely skeptical. This is a "disease" where nobody can agree that it's actually a disease, and worse, it could be far more easily treated using simple obesity reduction techniques, instead of spending billions to create a drug that helps people who are extremely sick.
Also recall that in the current system not everyone who contributes to a new drug is rewarded. The basic research that scientists conduct using public money is not financially rewarded when its used by new drugs. Why do only people at the end of the pipeline get to profit?
If the people who do the basic research patent their work, sure they get financially rewarded for it.
Go talk to the chemist at Northwestern who discovered Lyrica. Or the CF Foundation who made billions from Kalydeco.
the university sees much of the upside.
That's the issue with your "social good" approach, is that by capping the upside, you're capping the control one can exercise over their own livelihoods.
The smart scientist wanted to send their kid to a more expensive Montessori preschool instead of a neighborhood preschool? Too bad. You are capped at the socially accepted able salary range.
No matter how much extra work, training, contributions, the smart person would inject into their career, they are forever capped at the socially good rate.
Most engineers can’t scale companies. Just take a look at the wasteland of personal projects demo’ed on HN. Great technical execution, but they don’t get off the ground as a profit generating company.
And a company scaled to to billions of dollars is even more of an outlier. It’s absolutely a skill.
And yes, you can have a conversation of what value an exec brings vs the value generated by scientists inventing the products their selling. But the original point was that no one is coming after workers salaries — they’re not the ones making $15m a year.
Social goods that we ostensibly invest in, often are crappy career paths in terms of pay. If you don't believe me, talk with a teacher. We know that few things contribute to the social good as much as a good education, but tell me honestly. If you knew a poor, smart, hard working kid, what career path would you suggest, teacher or software developer?
Depends on what they like to do. There is a lot we can change so that people can do what they love without punishing careers that aren't directly tied to profit.
I’m all for smart people being paid well to work hard. But there has to be a better model. Perhaps something similar to the massive payouts we see lawyers getting in class action suits, except instead of law firms and defendants we have drug researchers and illnesses.
There aren’t enough resources out there to tackle every disease.
"Free market" isn't really the right term for this method of price discovery when life and limb is on the line. "Highway robbery" might be more appropriate.
Edit: It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not the scientists and researchers who are raking it in — it’s executive managers. It’s not about punishing value creators, it’s about stemming value extraction, aka rent-seeking, aka what makes markets not free according to Adam Smith.