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Comment by earl | Hacker News Reader

Characterizing not wanting a lower middle class lifestyle as wanting "money or lifestyle [sic]" is ridiculous. Working in a wetlab is essentially me making a $80K annual donation to charity, and amongst other things, would turn my student loans from a minor nuisance into a major expenditure. If society actually valued medical and cancer treatments instead of mouthing the words (which is free), there wouldn't be disparities like that, and working in a wetlab wouldn't be a major life sacrifice.

In practice, we spend $31B or so on the NIH [1], but we have $170B in fiscal year 2010 [2] for Iraq and Afghanistan, plus all the tail costs involved.

[1] http://www.nih.gov/about/director/budgetrequest/NIH_BIB_0209...

[2] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html

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You've implicitly dismissed the most likely case: there is an abundance of biology / chemistry graduates willing to work in a wetlab to help cure cancer. Supply & demand of skilled labor is a much more likely cause (ie: highly correlated) than what "society actually valued".

You're mixing up society with government.

And, by the way, you have not refuted grandparent at all. Much on the contrary, you have only ratified that you have chosen money and lifestyle over working on something you believe in. I don't think gp was judging you for that, only saying that was indeed your choice.

> And, by the way, you have not refuted grandparent at all. Much on the contrary, you have only ratified that you have chosen money and lifestyle over working on something you believe in.

The two aren't incompatible. He chose the money. If society truly valued medical research, he wouldn't have had to make that choice -- the money would be in medical research.

Society doesn't value cures - where's the money in that? Society _really_ gets off on long-term addictions.

I worked in the biomed industry as a research chemist and I can tell that there are plenty of pharma companies that would love to bring any profitable drug to market. Nobody is going to sit on a working cure. Drug research just happens to be really, really hard, with plenty of opportunities to fail right up to the last step with billions up in smoke.

I am normally not one to bemoan downvoting (I have enough karma that the occasional misstep doesn't really hurt me, and meta discussion is something I also don't want cluttering up HNN) but this one has me stymied at -3.

It seems patently obvious to me that the structure of our pharmaceutical system encourages maintenance doses over cures, and I'm not sure what about that would provoke at least four people to take action not to see it.

The problem with trying to cure most diseases is it's hard, not unprofitable. Most drugs are closer to replacing the oil early which can prolong the life of an engine, it's not as good as a refit but it's a lot simpler. Take diabetes, a cure requires you to fix any of a huge number of possible breakdowns in a wide range of systems; treatment requires administering a single chemical based on glucose levels. Which do you think is harder? Shure, in 100 years we might be able to repair someone’s DNA with minimal side effects based on what’s broken but that’s a long way off.

PS: People talk about drug companies funding research, but mostly they just do refinements and late stage clinical trials. They have minimal impact on the type of research that actually discovers how things work or the basic ideas for how to fix things and if a cure for a major ailment was possible they would jump on even a modest cash cow.

Granted, insulin is a great solution that works well enough to save a lot of pain, and diabetes is a complex condition. I'm not saying maintenance doses are always wrong - nothing is ever always wrong. I'm saying maintenance doses are profitable, and there's little incentive to look farther, unless you're just one of those nuts who can't help it. The nuts end up dragging the rest of us along, usually - so in the end, we end up muddling through. And you clearly can't make it a policy to fund all the nuts, because most of them are, well, they're nuts.

I remain convinced that funds could be allocated somewhat better. In this as in so very many other things.

Reminds me of the Chris Rock skit. The money is in the medicine, not the cure.

I'm generalizing, but It seems as if institutions who have made a living researching treatments to major diseases don't seem that interested in cures. That could threaten their existence. So they put their money in providing hospital services instead of research. They can't get government money for research grants if their idea for research seems too unorthodox.

In the end, it's about protecting jobs and finding a way for you to live longer with the disease.

Well, you don't even have to be cynical (although, having worked years on contract at Eli Lilly, I'm pretty cynical). All you have to do is look at the way the FDA is structured to see that you have to generate a lot of money for any new drug or technique just to be able to pay for its approval. The only way you can do that reliably is by always shooting for the maintenance dose of $300 a month from every patient. A one-time shot just isn't going to pass the math test.

As is always the refrain, the system is broken - if what you want is cures instead of a large and lucrative pharmaceutical industry.

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