Hacker News Reader

Comment by thehappypm | Hacker News Reader

It’s crazy that money is such a huge incentive. Knowing that a cure for Covid is a potentially $100B market means you throw the kitchen sink at it. Imagine being this lab. Do you think they ever had trouble hiring an assistant? Buying new equipment? Getting bonuses? This environment must be fantastically different from the typical meat grinder of bio R&D.

View on HN

I don't think it's fair to say that it's just money. There's also a global crisis and a huge need for such a drug.

Well hopefully money serves as a tool for prioritizing resources for important problems. Seems to be working well in this case.

Money has totally failed at allocating vaccinations and treatments for COVID-19 to 95% of the global population. But it's 'succeeded' in securing boosters for people who are already vaccinated in the richest parts of the world while global supply is lacking.

I guess that's just an unfortunate, cynical side effect of the "survival of the fittest".

Pharma doesn't do charity though. Drug risky is very expensive and highly risky. It's risky whether you research a drug for some disease that ten people have in the world, or for a pandemic.

Research related to the pandemic is de-risked by some margin and that alone makes it attractive.

I know people who have worked on some pretty revolutionary cardiac drugs that got laid off once their project was complete. It'll still be a meatgrinder for the talent behind these drugs. The spoils are further up the food chain.

This is what being an engineer during WW2 must have been like. Near infinite money and resources, but very tough deadlines

agree, The manhattan project alone was 1% of the US GDP during its most expensive year, that would equate to $230 Billion in today's dollars.

Along these lines, for anyone who hasn't heard of it:

At the Trinity test, there was a containment unit called Jumbo:

https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/jumbo

Basically, if Trinity fizzled, they wanted to be able to recover the billion dollar plutonium core.

It didn't actually end up being used, and so it was ordered destroyed. But the thing was so tough that they essentially couldn't blow it up. Normal bombs just weren't powerful enough. So now it's just sitting there at the site.

There are still occasionally projects which approach this relative scale today. When Boeing (temporarily) shut down 737 MAX production in early 2020 it was reported that this would reduce US GDP by between 0.3% and 0.6% (depending on the economist doing the calculation), for example.

Sadly, promise of money means "viability." Have to be realistic about these things.

You wouldn't believe it, but no one wanted to make a good hip broach to fix grandma. It took athlete injury repair R&D money to make that happen.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29120313.

It’s also a boom and bust business. Once COVID has gone away I bet funding will dry up and a lot of these people will have trouble finding work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com