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.'"
Breakthroughs? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yet here we have dozens of pharma companies, plus universities, all slaving away over a cage full of infected monkies, hugely profitable all the same, because there's so many different ailments of the human race, where a processor is pretty much a processor.
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.
But, some things are easy... (Score:3)
Other drugs kill things.
Comparatively, it is much easier to alter a balance than it is to kill things, WITHOUT killing the patient.
For example, if you have a hormone deficiency, it's pretty 'easy' to replace the hormone you're missing.
But if your body is being killed by a living organism (bacteria/virus/cancer/etc), it is much harder to kill the bad thing WITHOUT killing the good thing.
That's why it's easy to create anti-depressants and things that make it easier to have
Re:But, some things are easy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, as with my Crohn's example above, we have diseases where we dont' even understand the cause. We understand the cause(s) of depression and impotence a lot better though, which is why we have so many drugs for them. But think of the billions of dollars poured into research on those two fronts, and the hundreds of scientists engaged by the likes of Pfizer looking for the next big drug.
Imagine if, instead, we spent that money and used those scientists to research the root causes of diseases we don't know about? We might finally nail down the correct cause and therefore the proper treatment plan...then the hard work of developing drugs can begin. That won't happen as long as we're rehashing the same cures for the same diseases because it's easier and makes a lot of money...
You're still talking out of your @$$ (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a computer problem comparison since that is probably your specialty. There are a MILLION programs out there that can act as calculators, they're very easy programs to write - but there are only a handful of good BLAS libraries out there, those are difficult problems. You'd be called a fool if you suggested that we could make BLAS progress faster by taking the people off developing calculators and put them on BLAS - it's the same as your uneducated assumptions about the medical community.
Re:You're still talking out of your @$$ (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You're still talking out of your @$$ (Score:4, Insightful)
So comparing a single cell to a CPU, is like comparing a 2 transistor radio to a modern CPU's. Living organisms are vastly more complex and you simply cannot ignore interactions with other cells and organisms. (aka HIV and immune response)
We havn't even begun to discuss the huge time frames it takes to drugs approved these days. Its (IIRC) 10 years of human trials which is after 10 years of animal trials. 20 years from discovery to a drug you can use. Or more.
Personally I think this Intel guy has let success get to his head. He clearly has no idea what hes talking about.
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Why do we n
Re:But, some things are easy... (Score:4, Insightful)
We understand the cause(s) of depression
Not really. Consider a TV with a rolling picture. The repairman arrives and rolls out a toolbag with a hundred mallets of different sizes, shapes, and hardnesses. He whacks the TV with each one in turn until the picture stops rolling. Then he sells you that hammer and tells you to use it 3 times a day. He warns you that in anywhere from a month to years, that hammer will stop working and he'll go through them all again to find a new one that works. We WISH our understanding of depression and how to fix it was that good!
To get a closer analogy, you'd have to add that some of the mallets make the picture fuzzy, others only let you recieve some of the channels, and sometimes the only way to get vertical hold and anything but the spanish channel is to use 3 or 4 hammers in combination but they cause the commercials to last longer, etc, etc, etc.
If we treated Crohns the way we treat depression, it would have been pronounced cured years ago. Just take these morphine pills, regular transfusions and this IV feeding solution. See? cured!
Part of the problem there is the deceptive commercials that make it sound like they've solved the problem, just take their pills!
I do see your point though, there does seem to be a lot more effort put into non-essential drugs and pretty commercials than in developing drugs to treat serious diseases.
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Anyway, I have mixed feelings about this. I think to some degree academia is somewhat content with grants and making money for any given institution compared to getting hard core difference making results. Much prestige is gained my making a university or hospital money with grants independent of real results.
I think also we are comparing two different things. Human/biologic research is inherently more complicated on multiple levels than say process
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Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in Elan, the inventor of Tysabri.
Re:Breakthroughs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, we have how many different drugs to help old men get it up?
...which was developed in an attempt to treat angina [wikipedia.org].
Crohns & ED (Score:4, Informative)
Viagra... blood pressure medication. Boners were a side effect.
A number of the medications you rail against as fluff were actually discovered while trying to fight something more important. They turned out to be better at the fluff than the intended purpose, but fluff makes money too, and gears were switched so they got marketed for the side effect instead of the intended effect..
Re:Breakthroughs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Science needs to stay spread out and constantly looking at different things, not rehashing the same stuff over and over because it's easy. I mean, you never know, the cure something like Crohn's might lead by accident to the cure for cancer! That's why you need to blaze new trails and constantly strive for incrimental improvements across all disciplines of medicine.
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Also, I'm not well-versed in Crohn's disease, but I have to think from my perusal of online sources that your case is substantially worse than the typical case. I do not doubt that some people have it even worse than you, but based on what I've read and the few discussions I've had with my friend who has the disease, it seems to me that you're wedged far into the tail of the unenviable side of the bell cu
Re:Breakthroughs? (Score:5, Insightful)
- G
Re:Breakthroughs? (Score:5, Funny)
I agree with you 100.000000000137468%
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug [wikipedia.org]
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Anyway I'm convinced a big reason of the different pace of IT development resides in technology bringing closer the dream of powerful men to be able to control the world by themselves. Never fear the masses they keep
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Innovation on CPUs doesn't necessarily have to consist of obvious "breakthroughs". CPU performance has increased exponentially over those last 20 years due to incremental, evolutionary improvements. Opteron wasn't exactly a "breakthrough" either: it just extended Intel's long-in-t
If Intel did medical research... (Score:2, Funny)
More fun with analogies (Score:2)
We need to give wild ducks the opportunity to emerge and quack their way to success.
Fair enough... (Score:2)
Apples with oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
That's A Big "No Shit" (Score:4, Insightful)
So Mr. Grove, let's consider all the faulty products you shipped in just one year of your career at Intel--and now let's imagine every single customer that bought one of those products suing your company for a half-million dollars each, and winning....
~
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It's not like Merck or GlaxoSmithKline could refab a molecule and offer an exchange. When you take into account the FDA and lawsuits hanging over their heads like Swords of Damocles, it's *almost* a wonder how they still manage to stay in business.
(Almost, until you find they're able to shuffle trivial patents for known good medicine in and push those off to customers...but that's a r
Not without merit (Score:5, Insightful)
All of that could be put aside though, save for one major factor. There is a HUGE amount of money in the pharmaceutical world. And the sad fact is, more of that money goes to crap like Viagra commercials during the Super Bowl than to the research and development of new drugs and treatments.
I'm not saying everyone in the industry is a greedy whore, heck, I've met and worked with some really great people who are in it for the cures. But the privatization of research, the excessive burden of patents, and the big-business/lobbyist friendly approach of our government over the last 2+ decades have lead to a slowing of development and a maximization of profits.
-Rick
Re:Not without merit (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow.. that statement is just fundamentally stupid.
A new drug is either better than an old drug, or it isn't.
If it's better, then it doesn't matter if the patent on the old drug is 5, 10, 20, or 100 years long - your new drug will sell better than the old drug. And if it's worse, it still doesn't matter how long the patent on the old drug is - nobody is going to use your new drug.
If anything, long patents ENCOURAGE new drug development, because you can develop a slightly better drug and then compete patented-drug to patented-drug, whereas if patent duration is short, by the time you develop your new and improved patented drug, you have to compete with a now un-patented drug that is sold at generic prices.
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:Apples with oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Increased cost of development
2) Slower time to market
3) Increased cost of production
None of those prevent discoveries. They do raise the financial entry barriers for startups, however.
Re:Apples with oranges (Score:4, Funny)
If pharma advanced like processors:
-Time for a cold/allergy medicines to kick in would halve every 18 months.
-Medicines would be cheap, but you'd have to buy them in five-year supplies at a time.
-No one would be able to figure out what Mac molecules look like.
-Pill would do anything you wanted, except for the 50% of the time that you vomit them.
And if computers had to follow pharma regs:
-Chipmakers would have to run extensive tests to ensure they were Turing complete.
-Chips would be pulled off the market if they ran into any unpredicted infinite loops.
-Every computer would come with a book full of warnings including such gems as "Not intended for use underwater."
-Computer commercials would occasionally just mention the product in a positive light with no real information about functionality. (Oh wait, they already do that
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It is more than that... I once read a really insightful quote from no one less than Mr. Bill Gates who said (in scope of the Melidan-Gates Foundation) paraphrasing a lot:
"medical research is different from technology research, in that, in technology research you can throw a large sum of money and add some engineers to improve a given technology. But with medicine, you can keep
Basic Research (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's the way it ought to be. Not all things need immediate applications. Many of the most impressive inventions of our time have been a fusion of research that seemingly have few worthwhile applications. Expanding the sum of human knowledge is never a waste of time.
Re:Basic Research (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say that the medical industry has been feeding on the community for way too long. Medical procedures are insanely expensive and the equipment and medicine costs are through the roof. But it's not like medicine got any better in the last 30 years, only the scale has been slowly tipping in our health's favour, but it should have swung completely over already.
The medical industry has consumed more input than it has given back for a very long time. It's time we start seeing some payback to *everyone* who put money in the system: the consumers of medical care.
You're completely forgetting that this is "medicine" we're talking about here, and not "biology". One was to observe nature, the other one for curing people.
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You're completely forgetting that this is "medicine" we're talking about here, and not "biology". One was to observe nature, the other one for curing people.
They go hand in hand. Do you think they were trying to invent some miracle cure for some disease when they stumbled upon the structure of the DNA? Better understanding of our biology will eventually lead to better technologies and medicines. I'm not talking about pharma companies, I'm talking more about the guy's notion that research that has no immediate application is somehow a waste of time.
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You say that as if there was some way to a) measure progress against 'major diseases' and in some meaningful way and b) as if progress were guaranteed if only (the mostly mythical) big pharma would just do it.
Re:Basic Research (Score:5, Insightful)
Bzzt. Wrong. Endoscopic surgery. Cardiac stents. Infinitely better drugs. Colonoscopy. Go back to 1977 and have a stroke, a heart attack, a major car wreck, testicular cancer - hell, go back then and have chronic stomach ulcers. The treatment for those used to be a partial resection of the stomach through an open incision. Now, it's a course of antibiotics. Those were just the examples that occurred to me over the course of five minutes. There are a lot more.
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TFA is fundementally suggesting (IMO) that there is too much focus on what we think we know and not enough on what we don't, insufficient root cause research. Indeed, your example of the success of curing Stomach Ulcers is a clear case which SUPPORTS the Basic Research arguement
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We are so much better off medically in the last thirty years tha
Re:Basic Research (Score:5, Informative)
Instead, with modern advancements I was able to have the VATS procedure. This involves three tiny incisions and the insertion of a small camera to help the surgeon work. It's still a painful recovery, but there's a lot less interior trauma.
So it's BS to say there have been no advancements made over the last 20-30 years. Look at our life expectancy over that time - it's only gone up. That's not because we're net healthier (true, we smoke less, but then we're also much more obese), it's because we're eradicating or controlling more and more diseases, we're performing fewer and safer surgeries, and we're using more effective medications (yes, even for so far incurable diseases like HIV).
In fact, one of the things most people don't realize is that almost all of our life expectancy gains over the last 100 years have been due to disease control, not better overall health. In 1900, lots of people made it to 70 or 80 years old before death, but lots of people died when they were 20 from things like polio, smallpox and TB. Infant mortality was also much higher than it is now. In other words, we're living longer lives because of the health care industry, not because we're all eating better food.
That's to say nothing of modern pain management. Say what you want about oxycontin, I don't know how I would have gotten through the first six months after my surgery without it. A lot of modern medicine is focused on quality-of-life issues, which are important issues. 20 years ago, a doctor would have said to just live with it; the pain is good, means your nerves are coming back. The current thinking is it's not enough to just save a person's life, it's also about giving them a life worth living. After my pain meds ran out the first two weeks after my lung surgery, I was in absolute hell until I made it back to the doctor and got my prescription for oxycontin. People who have never gone through major surgery have no idea what real pain is like. Oxycontin made life bearable until I healed well enough to get off it (and seriously, it was about a year).
The pharmaceutical industry has its share of problems. But it's just way off base to say there have been no advancements over the past however many decades.
Agree: Big Pharma, not "research", is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
We have had steady advances in medicine. Just during the time I was in medical school (a decade ago), I was astounded by how much medical science had advanced. By the time I was finishing up on my medical training and getting ready for independent practice, we were being taught: "Remember that treatment for arthritis you learned in second year? Well, we don't do that any more --here's what we do instead
However, from the standpoint of the ordinary patient, there has been a problem in one specific area of medical research: Big Pharma. (That's what they call the largest pharmaceutical industries: Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, GSK, Astra-Zeneca, Wyeth, etc.) This is because they are not bringing new drugs to market.
Don't misunderstand me, now. I didn't say that basic research wasn't taking place, or that it didn't have potential to be developed into useful products. I said that Big Pharma was not bringing new drugs to market. I blame this on the profit-centred, corporate-minded groupthink that has been running Big Pharma. In a nutshell, Big Pharma has been mismanaged.
In the pharmaceutical industry, you can see a new drug coming from a long way off. First there has to be basic research; one in ten research studies will show a promising molecule (ie. possible drug candidate). One in ten molecules will be developed into a stable usable form that doesn't have to be sealed in gaseous form or injected directly into the kidney or other impractical things. One in ten usable molecules will show promise when tested on animals. One in ten animal-tested drugs will go on to clinical trials in humans. One in ten human trials will show something that's worthwhile marketing. (Okay, don't take the one-in-ten ratio too literally; a better estimate is that every drug brought to market came from somewhere around 500 to 1000 possible molecules.)
It takes time to go through all these discovery phases, and to go through clinical trials, get approval from the FDA (or equivalent regional drug authority), etc. There's a very long pipeline to go through before a drug gets to market, so you can see right now what sorts of drugs will be coming out five years down the road.
And Big Pharma has, basically, nothing coming out.
This is because there has been a huge merging frenzy in the past decade, almost like an orgy of nested expressions that would do any LisP programmer proud. Toss in SmithKline and Beecham, blend with Burroughs and Wellcome, sprinkle in some Glaxo, bake at high temperature, and out comes a steaming hot GlaxoSmithKline. Then there's Pfizer, gobbling up Warner and Pharmacia / Upjohn, and then spitting out the bones, a process so repetitious that the people eaten up and summarily laid off produced a T-shirt with the oval blue logo in the style of the Pfizer logo that says, "Pfired!"
It's been great for people juggling stocks. Valuations went up, people made money, CEO's made speeches
Any of you heard of "patent lawsuits"?
Yup, they went through patents! Hey, little company there, you can't sell our drugs, cuz WE have the patents! We have to make our money! My favourite example: a few years ago, a little company called Andrax sees that the patent for omeprazole (brand name Losec, or Prilosec in the USA) will be expiring soon, so they start developing a generic equivalent, preparing studies for the FDA to show that their generic equivalent is safe and equal to the brand name version. The plan is that, a year later, all the manufacturing equipment and research will be in place and they can start mass producing omeprazole the instant it comes off patent.
What happens? AstraZeneca ("AZ"), owner of the original brand name, sues Andrax for violating the patent. They say that the patent actually
Re:Basic Research (Score:4, Insightful)
The "medical industry" is not a research industry. It's a service industry, and provides the service of health care to an aging population that refuses to take basic steps to assure its health, such as universal health care, better pre-natal care, eating a better diet, exercising, and visiting a dentist once a year. So don't be surprised that the industry continues quite well providing that health care.
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From It's The Prices, Stupid: Why The United States Is So Different From Other Countries [healthaffairs.org]:
Monopoly power allows sellers to raise prices above those they would obtain in perfectly competitive markets. In the jargon of economics, they are thus able to earn "rents," defined as the excess of the prices actually received by sellers above the minimum prices the sellers would have to be paid to sell into the market. Countries differ in the degree to which they try to whittle away at the rent earned on the supply side through the creation of market power on the buy (monopsony) side of the market. A single-payer system would be called a "pure monopsony."
In the U.S. health system, for example, money flows from households to the providers of health care through a vast network of relatively uncoordinated pipes and capillaries of various sizes. Although the huge federal Medicare program and the federal-state Medicaid programs do possess some monopsonistic purchasing power, and large private insurers may enjoy some degree of monopsony power as well in some localities, the highly fragmented buy side of the U.S. health system is relatively weak by international standards. It is one factor, among others, that could explain the relatively high prices paid for health care and for health professionals in the United States.
In comparison, the government-controlled health systems of Canada, Europe, and Japan allocate considerably more market power to the buy side. In each of the Canadian provinces, for example, the health insurance plans operated by the provincial governments constitute pure monopsonies: They purchase (pay for) all of the health services that are covered by the provincial health plan and used by the province's residents.
Of course, Medicare is also forbidden from using its buying power to lower costs, anyway [nytimes.com].
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Liability... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental tenet that drives us all in the semiconductor industry is a deeply felt conviction that what matters is time to market, or time to money. But you never hear an executive from a pharmaceutical company say, "Before the end of the year I'm going to have xyz drug," the way Steve Jobs said the iPhone would be out on schedule. The heart of every high-tech executive has been, get the product into customers' hands and ramp up production. That drive is just not present in pharma; the drive to get sufficient understanding and go for it is missing.
Let me tell you, if Intel had to pay $5,000,000 to the widow of everyone killed by an FDIV bug who would have died 3 weeks later (eg, like a drug company has to do), they would be a lot more conservative about getting chips to market.
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Heh, I bet the FDA would have something to say about that...and it wouldn't be repeatable in polite company.
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Medical Records (Score:2)
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The medical establishment fears change in some ways. We still don't have computerized medical records in the US.
Citation needed. Long before "Vista" was the name of the Windows version formerly known as Longhorn, VistA [wikipedia.org] was a free software electronic medical record system used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Or is your complaint that the private hospitals have dragged on adopting free software?
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Lack of a standard record format?
Lack of standard definitions?
Lack of time and money? Lots of medical systems (think doctor's offices and small, rural hospitals) aren't exactly rolling in excess cash or excess time.
And if you're so very worried about being incapacitated away from home, you can do wonders with a copy of your records in a manila folder. Low tech. Functional. Or even a typed summary stuck in
Re: Change, Rational and Otherwise (Score:2)
medical regulatory bodies generally tend to reject new technology, even if individual patients are willing to accept the risks.
The usual logic for this is that if the regulating agency approves anything new that leads to the death of people, the regulatory agency gets blamed well for that--but if they refuse to approve a new medicine for use, nobody knows the true cost of doing that--how many people it would have saved. So from a practical
Break the news to you, Bucky (Score:2)
Unless you wear a medic-alert bracelet, which anyone with half a brain will do anyway. Besides being less prone to failure, they also don't require publishing your health history for anyone who feels like it to look up. Before you reply that they can be locked, remember that you're incapacitated
Next up... Car industry. (Score:5, Funny)
I'll bite (Score:2)
Former Intel CEO rips farming industry (agrobiz) for not doubling crop production and havling cost every 18 months.
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Nope, you can't generalize from one industry to another as simply as that, can you?
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Re:Next up... Car industry. (Score:5, Insightful)
As for Harley's: it's a taste. Like buying the biggest pickup truck you can find and jacking it up to 12 feet in the air. Or owning a hummer. Or a Ferrari for that matter. Now you might say, "a Ferrari? That's cool though!" Sez you. Still gets less than 10 mpg, you can't ever really use its speed without risk of getting caught, so you have an expensive, fuel quaffing car that looks pretty.
Personally, I hate Harleys. People make them loud as a cannon, drive down your road at 6 in the morning to go to work. "Loud pipes save lives," they say, which is utter crap because I can't even hear the tractor trailer next to me with my windows up, how the heck am I going to hear you coming up behind me? Whatever, it's a feeling of power thing, I gather, sitting on a big rumbling beast of metal.
tech innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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n 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.
As long as your magic gizmo can check in with the license server every time it needs to dispense a drug, and doesn't get accidentally marked as an illegal pirated copy of the gizmo and shut down. On top of that, better hope that the gizmo's makers don't force a patch update on it that causes it to go crazy and produce 10 times the dosage you need, plus another drug that supposed to be good for you but actually makes your heartrate climb towards 200bpm.
Unlike chip makers (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlike chip makers, pharmaceutical companies need a national government's approval to market their product. How quickly would Intel and AMD have been able to step up the capabilities of their processors if some Digital Restrictions Ministry or some other government agency had to approve every stepping?
No so easy (Score:4, Insightful)
First, given the current regulation scheme (the FDA in the US, for example) the distance between a fundamental discovery and an actual drug on the market is much greater in medicine than it is in technology -- Intel does not require approval from anyone to market their next-gen processor. Second, the current patent system makes making trivial improvements on existing drugs (hence extending monopoly protection) much more profitable than researching new drugs (high risk of failing to produce anything).
But even ignoring all these things, on a fundamental level biology is orders of magnitude more difficult than physics. We understand the physics of seminconductors and the mathematics of computation fairly well. We can simulate future processors ahead of time to see if a new cache design will improve performance or not. We have no idea how to simulate a biological system, and barely have quantitative models for event the simplest ones. Let's give it 100 years and try again.
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We're getting there. [nih.gov]
Yo! My ego and bank account too big to die (Score:2)
In all seriousness, I hope that he gets them moving, and that such cures are not only for folks with Groves' wallet.
Translation: "I'm elderly and scared of death" (Score:5, Insightful)
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This just in - WATER IS WET (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise it's all just an order for another box of a half-dozen duh's. To go.
It's not like computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Medical science is mostly things we don't know, so we stick to the few we do and research the heck out of them. Also, Big Pharma aren't interested in cures. Cures hurt profits. They research treatments, not cures. That's what I'd hope is the main point of a rant against Big Pharma. They are paid to keep people sick, but mask the symptoms, not to actually make them well.
Interesting. (Score:2)
Intel is making X86 cpus. They are very fast but they are still X86 CPUS. The still work on data in the same way as the 386 did but much faster. MMX and SSE? they are tacked on DSP instructions. What Intel and the other IC companies have done is just evolve basic digital logic circuits. They still use gates and work in binary. Take a look at things like the survival rate of cancer over the last 20 years and the survival rate for premature bir
Funny that he should say that... (Score:2)
True, things that have to work change much slower than our entertainment equipment and office accessories. Cars, airplanes and medicines take a looong time to d
Lack of progress?! (Score:2)
My standard anti-corporate response. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Fixed for you.
Moronic conspiracy theories (Score:2)
Put down the flamethrowers for just a femtosecond (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a bit depressing, considering it's one of the oldest sciences.
Re:Put down the flamethrowers for just a femtoseco (Score:2)
On a more serious note, there are advances in treating diabetes. Twenty years ago, diabetics had to use insulin from pigs or cows. Cancer survival rates are WAY up. You lump cancer into one disease when it is really hundreds. Those are the ones I know just a bit about, but the fact of the matter is that there IS plent of progress on a whole raft of diseases, but there is no magic "take and live forever" pill.
As for your last comment, two points: 1) one expects that the oldest sciences ma
Re:Put down the flamethrowers for just a femtoseco (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel vs a DNA-based computer (Score:2)
Talking about things you don't know about (Score:3)
What absolute horseshit. Has he _been_ to a meeting on, say, cancer research recently? I have. And I'll tell you that the vast majority of Big Pharma and academic researchers with NIH grants are working their asses off to develop the Next Big Drug. Not only are there public health reasons involved, but also big financial reasons as well. I've seen amazing things thrown at problems: room-sized robots screening chemical libraries, natural product extractions from flora and fauna harvested by divers from the sea floor, massive computer time and effort thrown into drug design, data mining of the literature of known compounds and their interaction partners, ultra-precise radiation delivery systems involving whole-body imaging...in other words, _huge_ technological efforts costing millions--nay, billions of dollars to develop treatments for cancer.
And you know what the net result is? We're still using drugs and techniques mostly discovered in the '60's to the '70's. Why? Because despite all of these efforts, we haven't found anything that works better. And that's the important thing. It has to work better. Not as good as. Better. Nothing much does.
There's luck involved. Things like Viagra come along not because we _designed_ it to be an ED drug (in fact, it was originally a treatment for high blood pressure), but because it was _discovered_ to be an ED treatment. You can say "I'm going to have a drug to treat prostate cancer by the next Apple Developers Conference" all you want, but it ain't gonna happen unless you get amazingly lucky.
Pharma is not the semiconductor industry because people are not machines.
lol (Score:2)
teensy difference between hardware and wetware... (Score:2)
With computer research (either hardware or software), going from idea to demo to production sample is a fairly straightforward investment of money and labor hours. If it works, it works, and if not, you try again. No harm done.
With medical research (either equipment or chemicals), every one of those steps is harder:
Bravo, Mr. Upgrove (Score:2)
I totally agree! (Score:2)
Besides, pharmaceuticals are the biggest patent trolls known to man. Just change two functional groups of an already known (and cheap) drug that already proved to be anti-cancerous and starting to market it as a new
patents (Score:2)
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.
Dilbert still has the answer (Score:5, Funny)
(misquoting shamelessly from memory)
PHB: I figure that anything I don't understand can't be that hard. "Reengineer our world-wide network topology: 30 minutes."
Rheumatoid Arthritis and YOUR own affliction? (Score:2)
My perspective is from having rheumatoid arthritis (RA). I have RA for five years now. Its always bubbling up so really impacts me. Got fired from my last job due to this.
In the RA arena researchers don't know the cause. Same thing for cancer and a host of other diseases. In a computer system, if you don't know the cause, its hard to fix. One first level drug, methorexate dials down the whole immune system to target RA. Then mo
Have to Agree (Score:2)
Academic researchers are the worst though. Many people who I have met who have existed in a pure academic world, especially in the medical world, are quite simply, utterly detached from the real world and solutions that have a practica
50 years ago the computer industry didn't exist (Score:4, Insightful)
Medicine is also chasing a moving target much more than say microchips are. There are always going to be new challenges in tech, but once a problem is "solved" in the computer world, it tends to stay that way. Compare that to what medical researchers have to deal with. As seen in the news, bacteria and viruses evolve. Malaria is a constantly moving target. Much harder to chase a moving target than a still one.
he gets it backwards (Score:2)
Intel, however, is a different story. Until Intel came along, there was a wide variety of processor designs, progra
Toys for the sake of toys (Score:5, Interesting)
FDA Approval (Score:2)
Science vs. Engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine trying to learn about computers by starting from scratch with a Core 2 Duo chip. Now multiply that by 1,000 and you have the human genome. And that doesn't even get into the more complex firmware, software, viruses, etc. of biological systems.
Re: (Score:2)
Aye, there's the rub. You simply cannot use semiconductor research as an analogy for medical research. While we know quite a bit about human (and other organism) biology, the amount we don't know is simply staggering.
This is just a rant by someone who was successful in one field thinking he can just take those lessons and transfer them to an entirely different field. He's also worrying about getting old, dying and all of those other misfortunes of mortal man.
Re: (Score:2)
Aye, there's the rub. You simply cannot use semiconductor research as an analogy for medical research. While we know quite a bit about human (and other organism) biology, the amount we don't know is simply staggering.
Yeah but if my lungs fail why can't I live on an artificial lung? If my heart fails why can't I live on an artificial heart? Equipment like this exists in one form or another but it is not manufactured in a way which makes it cost effective to deploy on a large scale, and is not mature enough to be considered reliable.
If we had better connections between engineering and medical science we could all live a lot longer.
Re: (Score:2)
And if pharmaceutical companies always remain profitable, why do they receive grants? To me, it would make more sense if a company rece