Trump's Science Policies Pose Long-Term Risk, Economists Warn
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Exenatide exists because government-funded VA researchers were isolating compounds from Gila monster venom to see what they did.
They were fooling around with random reptile venom because other government researchers at the NIH were exposing test animals to Gila monster spit to see how it worked and they noticed effects on the pancreas.
The wider medical community thought it was absurd that a molecule derived from Gila monster spit could treat diabetes and it took several years of the VA scientist going to conferences and repeatedly presenting his findings before a single (relatively small, at the time) company decided to take a risk and license the discovery.
Exenatide was one of the first drugs to target the GLP-1 receptor. During trials and subsequent approval it was noted that some people lost weight while taking it.
This led to further research by pharmaceutical companies, with Lilly, being part one of the partners in an alliance to manufacture Exenatide, finally developing tirzepatide.
Mounjaro and Zepbound exist because a small team of government-funded scientists were playing around with lizard spit in the 1980s.
Certain people are completely incapable of understanding how seemingly useless research can lead to advances.
Either that, or they hate the fact that it happens and want to destroy it.
Or anything that takes more than a year or two (the above was a 40+ year process) to come to fruition is difficult to comprehend.
One of the major reasons the US is rich is that a relatively small trickle of government scientific research funding turns into a great tsunami of profit after decades and decades of profitless slow burning.
what youre describing was 45 years ago. since that time tax funded research has become a “cushy job” where the politics matters far more than the output. the real work is done in private R&D where you actually have to get things done. no stealing money from people en mass to fund it.
The concerns about losing ground in science are particularly acute in artificial intelligence, the technology that experts believe is most likely to drive productivity gains in coming decades. American companies have dominated the early phases of the A.I. revolution, partly because much of the foundational work was done at U.S. universities.
Which raises (but does not beg) the question: why don't the young people around him doing the plotting and planning care about tanking the country? How is Musk going to sell his cars? Why does JD want to rule over a smoking, disease-ridden ruin?
My hypothesis is that those young people have spent their entire lives in one particular information environment, which combines economics, politics and a religion. The religion says that the economic and political policies are blessed and ordained, They are carrying out policies fore ordained to succeed.
I'm willing to listen to other theories, but this is what it looks like to me
Faith-based decision making is a hell of a drug.
I suspect they are firstly idiots and secondly grifters.
They are blind to the long term effects of their plans but hope to grift along the way.
Sure, buying puts or shorting huge amounts of stock now (expecting near term market manipulation) is “a strategy”. But there would be significant risk in how fast one could crash the markets to make it worth the while. Doing it to am individual stock or industry would be far safer and more lucrative and just destroying everything.
Would also be a lot of uncertainty in how quickly such long term damage could be repaired, even if at all.
Even trying to think like a psychopathic traitor, doing all this to win favor with a dictator in a frozen second rate country seems odd.
There aren’t many predominantly English speaking countries in the world. What do they expect to do? Buy Belize and retire there? Surely not going to be Greenland!