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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps.

If you feel you have an understanding of the system I'm criticizing, why not help me understand why it has to be this way? I get it if you don't have the time or inclination to do so, but surprisingly I'm actually really open to learning new things and it would be appreciated not only by me but by other people reading your comments if you could explain the current system, perhaps other systems that have been tried and failed, and perhaps compare it with other systems (if they exist) that don't do it this way (giving the IP to the university even though it might be considered, by some less knowledgeable people, to be a 'work for hire.' Where it would seem that the agencies providing grants are doing the hiring.

Always ready to listen an learn new things.

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I took an undergraduate course on the economics of science and technology. A large portion of it was devoted to patents.

The problem is generally that public funding accounts for extremely small amounts of the funding that it requires to take a drug to market. I didn't lookup any numbers for this, but I would guess it's very rarely above 1%.

The government could try to claim some share of the profits from drugs derived from research that was partially grant funded, but that seems logistically very difficult and not worth it. The government already gets a share through various taxes anyways.

The purpose of public research is to encourage innovation, which in turn benefits everyone. Private companies usually have no incentive to make any of their research public which can lead to many places repeating the same things.

Yeah. This is the only system ever found that reliably turns out 30–40 new drugs a year. Others like USSR’s and Japan’s didn’t.

How many of those are any good and not snake-oil crap?

The FDA publishes withdrawal notices in the Federal Register [1]. The withdrawal rate for reasons of effectiveness is something like ~1/yr.

[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies/food-and-drug-admin...

Withdrawal notices are only related to active harm and not efficacy AFAIK

We could have many compounds out there that don't do anything for their intended target but aren't actively harmful

I apologize if my statement was unclear. I'm not claiming to understand the system any better than you.

The type of comment that you left is a pattern I have been noticing where someone will state that they don't understand something and then proceed to criticize it.

This does not make sense to me, as I don't understand how someone can assume they have legitimate criticisms of a system without first asking clarifying questions to improve their understanding.

That's fair and I appreciate the feedback. FWIW, I suspect we think about the phrase 'legitimate criticism' a bit differently, I was trying to be pretty clear that my criticism, such as it was, was based on the existing system annoying me. For me, anyone who tells me about a system that annoys them I consider it a legitimate criticism in part because I think it is legitimate for anyone to criticize any system that annoys them for any reason. I may not agree with it, and the system may not annoy me, or I may sympathize but realize it is unavoidable, but it is still okay for them to criticize it.

well I don't really understand the system either, but there were multiple organizations making grants, so if you granted rights to all of them what rights would be left for you - that seems problematic. Also I suppose it was an expensive thing to do so they needed to get grants from multiple places, it seems like any recommendation to change this would be liable to have all sorts of side effects and, in the short term at least (5-10 years) likely to make the system function worse than it is now.

Perhaps there is some negotiation already going on for grant moneys, I would expect so if any grants were sizable, I mean if I am giving you a million dollars to study something I might say before hand these are my requirements and you would probably say yes or no, but maybe some grants were much less in size and involved things like use of facilities. In those cases it would be much more likely to change your value estimation of the grant and maybe refuse because not worth it, but if not worth it less stuff gets made and at some point we are the things working worse than before because some researchers would be like screw this academic career I can just go be a quant somewhere.

I mean as I understand it being a scientist is not exactly really rewarding https://www.zippia.com/scientist-jobs/salary/ so I would probably not want to do anything that made it potentially less (financially) rewarding because while people also do things for the good of humanity and so forth at some point when you're eating your Top Ramen with your disgusting room-mates maybe you might be tempted to change your life course for something with increased comfort.

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