Former Intel CEO Rips Medical Research 484
Himuanam writes "Former Intel CEO Grove rips on the medical research community, contrasting their lack of progress with the tech industry's juggernaut of breakthroughs over the past half-century or so. 'On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.'"
Re:No so easy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:tech innovation? (Score:1, Interesting)
You can still get the equivalent of supercomputer today with your custom software that was available couple of decades before. But most people, except few big business cannot afford it.
It will be the same way. In the future you will have a magic gizmo that can take a look inside your body and synthesize a drug for your needs and it would mean that you have access to technology that is now possessed only by big pharma.
Rich and wise aren't always the same. (Score:5, Interesting)
No question that medicine is a different culture than engineering. I've spent a lot of time in both, and I know. I also know that medicine is NOT particularly creative, and you don't really want it to be. You want your illness to be routine and fixable, and being routine means that nobody has to sweat particularly hard to figure it out. The sweat, and there's plenty, has to be done in research and development, and the difference in development effort between a new therapy for a disease and a new electronic entertainment device is remarkable.
He talks about how the two cultures deal with failure. In engineering, particularly in microelectronics, failure means that you spend money, time, and energy fixing something you broke. In medicine, failure means that you kill somebody. This used to happen a lot, and the modern biomedical research culture is highly biased against failure. It's not OK to die in a study any more, even if the condition we're studying is in and of itself fatal. Changing this would speed up the process of research, but who's volunteering to die for the cause? (And no, offshoring it is NOT the answer - foreign governments are wising up to this quickly, as are domestic ethics consultants.)
He derides modern statistical techniques, misunderstanding the difference between statistical failure and subgroup averaging, and he flatters himself a prophet when he recommends something that pharmaceutical researchers have been doing for thirty years: analyzing failure to see if you can find partial success somewhere.
He writes off in a sentence or two the hardest problem of all, which is figuring out what in the heck is really going on (preparatory to changing it). In engineering, the complexity is finite and human-directed, and the systems are designed with severable components to make the process of debugging and analysis easier. In medicine, the complexity is engineered by a billion years of evolution, not all of it productive or even useful, and very poorly understood. In an organism such as people, where 50,000 poorly-understood genes interact with factorial complexity, just figuring out which end to push on can be maddening. It's the reason that peer review was invented: if you're up a creek with a paddle-less enzyme, there are probably only a few hundred people in the world who can tell whether you're a genius or just confused. Peer review at its best is just like open source. At it's worst it's a lot like open source at it's worst, but the less said of that the better.
I would love to see more acceptance of modern information techniques and more flexibility in medical research. I would love to see better use of rapid prototyping and model systems, and we're heading that way. We've actually come a huge way in medicine just in the last decades, and the pace is accelerating. TFA is just a measure of the fact that, just like software, sometimes the better the system gets, the more you can see how imperfect it is.
Toys for the sake of toys (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Put down the flamethrowers for just a femtoseco (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Breakthroughs? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, my wife has Crohn's disease. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crohns/ [wikipedia.org]
It's a pretty nasty disease of the small intenstine which affects something like half a million people in North America. The treatments start off typically with steroids (an old drug with lots of well-known nasty side effects), moving onto Imurin (a kidney anti-rejection drug that's been out for awhile, also with lost of nasty side effects) and Remicaid (the only really "new" treatment for it...still with nasty side effects though). Once those has been exhausted, they perform surgery to remove the infected parts, and then start all over again.
Here's the problem, it was discovered in 1932! In 75 years the best they can do is pump you full of nasty drugs that are toxic to the liver and kidneys until your body won't take it anymore, and then cut the infected sections out. They haven't figured out a proper cause for it yet! Some think it's an auto-immune disease, some think it's actually a persistant infection of the intestinal lining, some think it's genetic, some think there's a genetic predisposition and that diet or taking too many anti-biotics as a child will essentially "activate" it.
When you think about it, that's rather sad... We can't figure out what causes a disease we've knows about for 75 years and that affects half of million people. Of course, we have how many different drugs to help old men get it up? (And yet, strangely, they still haven't come up with one to help women want sex more. =) )
Yes, I realize that's a legit medical concern, but maybe we could work on other things besides another depression pill, or another drug for impotence, or another of whatever cash crop drug is currently popular with the medical industry. In the tech industry they don't leave things behind like that... We don't have 25GHz PC's with 32MB of RAM and 512KB graphics cards.
And it proves his ignorance (Score:2, Interesting)
And his idea of needing more non-conformists is fine provided he favors snake-oil salesmen. While the scientific community is a little slow to change, this is overall a good thing. Even the biggest changes, the most recent of which being the acceptance of prions, eventually occur and only take a 5-10 years (largely because only a few people were working on it and they needed to do a LOT of experiments).
Re:Breakthroughs? (Score:1, Interesting)
men who think they could use a better boner in NA: like, all of them.
sad drones willing to put their faith in the placebo effect of SSRIs: lots n' lots.
i'm not saying we should junk this free market thing entirely. but, yeah, could maybe use some intelligent oversight. sadly lacking in any form these days.
He's got a point. Here's an example: (Score:5, Interesting)
That's fucked up. This is politics essentially censoring science.
Now, I've seen a lot of arguments in this thread about how medicine is so regulated and semiconductors aren't, but I think that's slightly disengenuous. In fact, Intel has broken the law many times in their chip making efforts. This is not a secret. They've been sued probably hundreds of times since the seventies for contaminating groundwater supplies with heavy metals and doing all kinds of mean nasty things that release toxic chemicals into the air, water and dumped across the land. That's just a fact and it shouldn't be surprsing to anyone here at Slashdot. I'm all into recycling and doing my part to save the planet and what not, but being fully aware of Intel's past I'm still using their products right now. I'm culpable as well. What's done is done. They bent the rules and went for it and they certainly had the nuts to go ahead and say fuck it to the rules sometimes even if it meant lawsuits. Intel has been sued for taking chances with peoples health on hundreds of occasions. It's not such a different situation. Let's not pretend they never took any risks and everything was just hunky dory and above board all the way down the line and somehow it's a whole different game for people in medicine.
Admittedly, there is a big time difference in the business models which helps explain the differences. Semiconductors are essentially a glorified form of printing that uses lots of nasty chemicals. So printing and money go hand in hand. Money is printed too, after all. Medicine is a whole other ball of tits. It is supposedly privatized and profit oriented in the US, but it doesn't really work that way on the research level as we see with this story about Ian Wilmut and the questions that weren't asked. Personally, I belive medicine should not and essentially can not be profit oriented in an effective way, certainly not a moral way. It should be government subsidized just like education and the government should be forward thinking and willing to take chances and innovate. The heart of the problem with that plan is that the American electorate seems to be so incredibly dysfunctional and hooked on this psychotic free market rhetoric that real advanced medical techniques based on stem cells, gene therapy and tailored therapies will probably emerge and become popular in the massive state subsidized medical systems of Asia and Europe first.
Re:Breakthroughs? (Score:1, Interesting)
Slice the colon at both ends and throw it away. Take the inner end, cut a new hole in the abdomen, tie the small intestine to this hole so it pokes out like a groundhog checking its shadow, and allow feces to drop at will. Then make the person more socially acceptable by putting a plastic bag over their brand new anus.
My small intestines didn't start up at first, so my stomach was producing bile but it was not exiting through my small intestine. It backed up until I couldn't hold any more, and I puked. Their solution?
Stick a tube through my nose, down to my stomach, to pump out the bile. Give me food through an IV. The risk of infection is so high they call it "Yellow death".
So, I was eating no food, had nothing in my stomach, nothing coming out my butt, and my colon was in the lab. The only "normal" processing that was done was my liver and my small intestine - everything else was bypassed like a warp core through the secondary power couplings.
Impressive, and I'm thankful, but it does reek of "We don't know, lt's stick this over here and see what happens".
Re:You're still talking out of your @$$ (Score:4, Interesting)