mbnielsen

I can't help but notice that the displayed CO2 levels in your example images are quite high. If they're screenshots of the system in action I would change the air in your home more often. If they're just made up numbers, then never mind :)

Many comments so far seem to try to handwave away the 90 % failure as somehow "optimal" in the system, which seems absurd to me. It is clearly not advantageous for individual companies to keep a drug candidate alive long enough for it to fail in stage III or IV. One obvious question is why they don't and it is very, very tempting to speculate that it's because the problems are getting harder, we are targeting novel mechanisms etc. Again, I think this misses a simpler explanation:

As with many cases where companies make seemingly bad decisions, I think a lot of the explanation lies in system dynamics. Think about the incentive structure inside large pharma companies - it is generally not a career advancement move for a project manager to kill the drug candidate they oversee. It is career advancing to get it approved for the next stage. What could possibly go wrong in this world?

As someone living in a country where , is used as the decimal separator, I cannot begin to describe the number of times CSV data has caused me grief. This becomes especially common in an office environment where Excel is the de facto only data handling tool that most people can and will use. Here the behavior of loading data becomes specific to the individual machine and changes over time (e.g. when IT suddenly forces a reset of MS Office application languages to the local one).

That said, I don't really know of any alternative that won't be handled even worse by my colleagues...