does anyone know...?

[Michael A Barnhart]

zeta_theking wrote: is it a condition that affect lots of americans. Yes and No, It is a form of glaucoma, but in her case a rare form that only is known to effect Scottish descendants. The cure was a new form of a pressure valve inserted into the side of the eye. Yes it was from a drug company (Alcon Lab a few miles from my home) and what ever made it unique was just released. (It could have been a year or two earlier, but hers was the first usage in the Saint Louis area.) She is now free from eye drops and treatment for a bleeding problem in the eye that was part of the problems. "Don't be so anti-american, would you? KaЯl (to Paul Watson on Baseball Bats) 26 Nov '03 "

[zeta_theking]

Daniel Turini wrote:(you should talk to my doctor, he's so excited about those C# 2.0 Generics and iterators! ) I hope u know what Generics are.Advances in Therapeutics don't mean anything,if they don't translate into actual therapies that benefit people.I Think the actual point of my post,which has to do with drug companies has been missed. Most ground breaking research being done are at universities not drug companies.They are too busy twitching current drugs to make more money.

[Daniel Turini]

zeta_theking wrote: I hope u know what Generics are. Rest assure I know what Generics are both in medical sense (both Brazil and India have a strong Generics industry) and in programming sense. zeta_theking wrote: Most ground breaking research being done are at universities As with any research field. zeta_theking wrote: They are too busy twitching current drugs to make more money. And what should they be doing? The whole purpose of a company is to make money! If your company you work at is not focusing on making money, it's time to look for a new job, before they won't be able to pay your salary! About high-risk, long researches, those are mostly done at universities. Just think about it: where is teleporting being researched? At huge corporations, or at public universities? Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. -- Bruce Schneier By the way, dog_spawn isn't a nickname - it is my name with an underscore instead of a space. -- dog_spawn

[RChin]

zeta_theking wrote: I don't know much about medical research,but i don't think curing bacteria or even understanding what the were was an easy task. Nevertheless committed people who had true passion for what they did came up with answers. That was b4 over commercialization.Noone says it will easy to cure cancer or AIDS ,but how much effort and resource are truly being devoted to research in finding cures.The dedication is simply not there. I suppose that this is a soapbox topic, but if nobody else minds, then I won't moan! :) IMHO, I think it is a bit unfair to claim that the enthusiasm and dedication isn't out there. Just like the members of CP, there are thousands of doctors and researchers out there that are just as passionate about their work and their aid to the rest of the world.
I could also take your point that our commercialised world has somehow killed the true objectives of these drug companies. But the fact of the matter is that over the last 70yrs, medical science has had great leaps in progress (quantum, in fact!).
Unlike trying to solve a mathematical equation, or fixing a software glitch, medical cures cannot be 'solved' in the same way. A bunch of doctor buffins cannot 'find a cure' by banging their heads together and come up with a solution. It takes patience, experimentation, and a lot of times, luck (google on the discovery of penicillin)! Add also the strict laws that these companies need to follow when creating and testing life saving drugs, its a wonder how most of the stuff you find in a drug store gets released to the general public (though I know that it does take years for a drug to be passed by the FDA). Medical research , I suspect, is a whole different ball game that what most people think it is.
But one truth that shines though about what you mentioned are the way how the drugs companies handles their research. I am sure most of them are very honourable, but you have to remember that they are a 'business'. These companies are here to make profits, so don't expect freebies or handouts (unless its in their interest).
All-in-all I think that the dedication *is* there. Its just being hampered/controlled by the powers that be. Sometimes this is a good thing. The current hot medical topic about using cloned foetuses for organ replacement is a good example of this. I've said my 2 pennies. I thank u.

[Roger Allen]

Developing drugs is an expensive and difficult task. Companies synthesis 100,000's of compounds, from this they can get maybe 100 candidates. Of these maybe 10 do something useful. Of those maybe 1 or 2 are not going to have serious side effects and make them too toxic. It then has to be thouroughly tested for physico-chemical properties (which is what my company produces instruments to do). Even then, it may still fail to pass FDA approval etc. All this costs huge amounts of money. The industry is getting cheaper and better at it, with software prediction packages which are trainable coming to help, but even then you need real data to base the training sets on, and in many cases the quality of the data available is questionable. And chemisty and bio-chemistry is very difficult to predict. I don't think they do it to suck us dry, but it is expensive Roger Allen - Sonork 100.10016 If your dead and reading this, then you have no life!

[zeta_theking]

Roger Allen wrote:I don't think they do it to suck us dry, but it is expensive Oh..i think they are partly guilty of trying to milk us dry.You just have to look back to beginings of the 20th century ,when desease such as polio were being tackled. The researchers back then delt with the same complexities in biology, but they were'nt corrupted by financial propect.Today most our brightest researchers are stucked in company labs without the kind of intellectual freedom needed for progress.

[Chris Meech]

zeta_theking wrote: The dedication is simply not there Oh I think it is there. But because of their dedication, you hear absolutely nothing about their work. They have no time or need to publish. It is an unfortunate consequence of the people doing that kind of work. One of the reasons for you hearing of the other research, is because of the large funding that goes along with it. For instance the greatest amount of funding that occurs for cancer research is voluntary public contributions. If all of this money was directed to research, the contributions would dry up. But instead a portion of it is used to document advances, spread new knowledge and this keeps it in the face of the public. And so contributions continue year after year. :) Chris Meech It's much easier to get rich telling people what they want to hear. Chistopher Duncan I can't help getting older, but I refuse to grow up. Roger Wright I've been meaning to change my sig. Thanks! Alvaro Mendez

[Jeff Varszegi]

I see this as one of the biggest problems with capitalism. It's in the best interest of a company to keep a financially good thing going. Of course, something that's in the financial best interest of a company is not necessarily what's good for society. A good case in point is the avoidance of the use of crumb rubber in pavement in the U.S. We have zillions of tires lying around unused in gigantic dumps here, often smoldering and bursting into flame. A good use for all this rubber is to grind it down for use in new products; the resulting granules are called "crumb rubber". One of the best uses for this rubber is to mix it in with blacktop material as it's mixing; this makes the resulting pavement much more resistant to (even proof against) cracking due to temperature changes and other stress, since the pavement becomes more flexible as a result. It also increases traction in all weather conditions. Of course, this has been blocked from large-scale acceptance here because lots of companies make lots of money redoing the major roads and highways in this country every year... With crumb rubber, chances are you could lay a road and have it last for twenty years or more. A seven-year test was conducted in Alaska and the material held up perfectly, while the control section of highway fell completely apart. Regards, Jeff Varszegi

[Chris Meech]

zeta_theking wrote: i think they are partly guilty of trying to milk us dry Okay. Wonderful. You have discovered that corporate greed, which is really just an extension of personal greed, is partly to blame for the lack of research into cures for diseases. What is your proposal to affect some change in the way this process functions? zeta_theking wrote: You just have to look back to beginings of the 20th century ,when desease such as polio were being tackled. I think polio was around long before the beginnings of the 20th century and I think that people were working on cures for it long before the beginning of the 20th century. It maybe unfortunate that money is what drives people to do things, but complaining about it is not going to change it.:) Chris Meech It's much easier to get rich telling people what they want to hear. Chistopher Duncan I can't help getting older, but I refuse to grow up. Roger Wright I've been meaning to change my sig. Thanks! Alvaro Mendez

[David Patrick]

zeta_theking wrote: Most ground breaking research being done are at universities. A lot of university research is funded by goverment AND corporations. Just because it is being done at/by a University does NOT mean it is being done for philanthropic purposes.

[Brit]

There's the ebola vaccine[^]. Also, someone recently discovered that speen cells can be turned into pancreatic cells - curing one type of diabetes. Diabetes, of course, requires constant blood-sugar monitoring and insulin injections. Thus, the cure for diabetes will reduce the number of people who need to buy insulin (a long-term treatment). zeta_theking wrote: when was the last time one of the US drug companies came up with a cure for anything? ... it seems every therapy developed by drug companies today is some kind of life-long dependent therapy ... and finanialy milk them for life. I'm not sure that it's quite as sinister as that. I do agree, however, that as long as the economics favor long-term treatments, companies are going to throw their R&D budgets towards them. It's not just long-term treatments, either. Anything that is going to bring in the money and does so over a good period of time and anything that large numbers of people want (particularly if those people have money) is going to have a natural economic attractiveness to companies. Viagra is an example of something which large numbers of wealthy people are willing to spend money on - but it isn't something that people need. In short, the question drug companies are asking is not "how can we get people hooked and milk them until they die?", but rather, "Why do we want to spend money developing drug A, which will return 10% on our investment, instead of drug B, which will return 50% on the company's investment? How can we justify our decision in light of the competitive marketplace, the company's economic health, and in our shareholder's eyes?" You might argue that there is no functional difference between the two, but it does imply different remedies to the problem. If drug companies are acting sinister, then we believe the drug companies have gone bad and the remedy is to replace those people with good people - it's moral problem. On the other hand, if drug companies are merely following their economic interests, then the remedy is to figure out how to change the economic system so that they are rewarded for finding the cures that most benefit society - not a question of morality. ------------------------------------------ The ousted but stubbornly non-dead leader reportedly released an audiotape this weekend, ending by calling on

[Michael A Barnhart]

zeta_theking wrote: The researchers back then delt with the same complexities in biology, but they were'nt corrupted by financial propect. The researchers back then also did not have to worry about the daily risk of multimillion dollar law suites as they do now. So IMHO the greed (trying to milk us dry) goes both ways. "Don't be so anti-american, would you? KaЯl (to Paul Watson on Baseball Bats) 26 Nov '03 "