Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials(columbiaspectator.com) |
Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials(columbiaspectator.com) |
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation http://www.jdrf.org/ funded $100 million dollars of research last year alone into research for juvenile diabetes (type I). Link: http://www.jdrf.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewPage&p... Funding is predominantly from individuals and families searching for a cure for diabetes. That includes people like myself and my family. We could care less what mechanism or what business model cures diabetes.
Of that research, there is significant research into stem cell therapies and cures Link: http://onlineapps.jdfcure.org/AbstractSearchEngine.cfm Select "stem cell therapy" from the drop down.
Lastly, the head of JDRF is a tech star. http://www.jdrf.org/index.cfm?page_id=113971 He founded Citysearch and Overture (the originator of keyword marketing. Bought by Yahoo).
I'm a big JDRF supporter since my sister has Type 1 diabetes. For any of you that are passionate about curing Type 1 diabetes, look into JDRF. Link: http://www.jdrf.org/
To say that all "pharmaceutical companies" blocked him on this because treatment is more profitable than cure seems rather absurd. You would think that with all the non profits out there already involved in solving this, there would be quite a few with interest in the research.
Also, as most startup people know, a short term large profit is awesome! Any company that truly finds a cure would make buku bucks in the short term and be able to bail from the market when everyone that can be cured is. Think about polio and Salk. The guy became a legend, and though it isn't talked about, decently rich.
This is normally a great thing, but it opens up two risks: the blind leading the blind, and conspiratorial thinking.
The blind leading the blind is what happens when someone has an idea about a disease or treatment, finds one article in pubmed or one book by one author to support that idea, and proceeds to remain ignorant about the entire rest of the body of work on the topic. It's almost like a race: if the good information gets there first, people believe it; so too for the complete hogwash in Medical Hypotheses.
The second issue that plagues first year med students and HNers is conspiratorial thinking. This is largely a consequence of having little knowledge, and this finally brings me on topic.
This current article discusses how someone was denied funding for human trials of stem cell therapy despite the fact that it cured T1D in animal models. When I see this, I think, "Of course nobody would have funded that!" Here's why I think that:
Ten years ago, stem cell biology was far more limited than it is now. And I'm talking strictly about biology, not ethics or politics.
The first gene therapy trials resulted in the death of Jesse Geisinger; though stem cells are a different beast entirely from the viral vector used in that trial, this still cast a pall over the use of active biologics.
Using stem cells that do not come from the recipient may require immunosuppressive drugs. This is such a high burden to pay that it seems inconceivable that someone would take this risk. I'd rather inject insulin all day long than be on immunosuppressive therapy. Induced pluripotent stem cells did not become a possibility until Yamanaka discovered his factors.
There is the risk that stem cells will lead to tumor-like conditions. A woman died in 2009 from an unlicensed stem cell therapy that caused just that. Animals are the model in which we should fully understand these risks, subjecting humans to them only after we understand what the risks are, and why they might occur. Especially for T1D, which has very good, lifesaving therapeutics already. The human risk-benefit has to be there.
People often work on animal models for years, even a decade, before going to human trials. This fuy had a successful mouse model. So far, so good. But let's see primate work; let's see replication in other labs.
At the end if the day, this just doesn't seem like a conspiracy to me. Some small drug company would love nothing more than to completely disrupt the market for diabetes therapeutics. Sure, it might transform a $100 billion market into a $10 billion one - but they currently have 0% of the 100 billion market, and would have 100% of the 10 billion one.
Tl;dr - Stem cell biology is novel and poorly understood, especially 10 years ago. It is unsurprising that nobody wanted to fund a highly risky human trial for a disease that already has lifesaving therapeutics. I find conspiratorial thinking to be a trait shared by those early in their medical training and by HNers, and it can be frustrating to see great minds turn to those rarely-correct conspiratorial thoughts.
In biology, reliable layers of abstraction do not exist. Period.
Biological technologies may arise with enough flexibility and processing power to deal with this situation. But situation itself won't change. Life simply evolved without fixed boundaries to its layers of abstraction. Every bit of evidence we have points to the genetic code as being more akin spaghetti coded assembly language than to any human-comprehensible programming language. Why would the genetic "programming" system respect any layers of abstraction understandable by humans? Life's been chugging away with 4 billion years of "whatever works".
Roge J. Williams' work early in the 20th showed how in just about every single biochemical system in the body, something like 20+% of the population and that with these outliers not correlating, every person's biochemical system actually work in somewhat unique fashion. That is hard manage and control from an engineering perspective, to say the least. See http://www.amazon.com/Biochemical-Individuality-Roger-Willia...
Then again, I'm largely ignorant on this subject so I'm certainly not making any accusations in this case.
However, I agree with the point though that too many HNers often seem to be naive about the larger picture which I guess we could all be accused of in some way.
I do.
How about some evidence show that this has happened more than a handful of times in the last 20 years?
Note a company refusing to fund a competitor is NOT evidence of "avoid potential cure". Heck - a company refusing to fund something for eany reason is not evidence.
The act that you need to document must be someone going out of their way to block something, not merely refusing to help.
That's all you really need to know about any story about big, evil companies supposedly suppressing new technology.
Weissman is not "someone". He is one of the founding fathers of the stem cell field and has done amazing thing. He is a leader in the field and got really amazing results with animals. Sorry to say that but you sound like the first year student here.
In my other comments on this thread, you can see that I feel his work is important. So if you're concerned, as is implied in your language, about my respect for his work, you can rest assured.
These ideas, conceived in the medical domain, apply, in some way, to the wider world of media reports.
Ever notice that when you really know an area, news reports about it nearly always get it wrong. Completely misunderstand what's going on. Often interpret it as one of a few stock, basely motivated, scenarios.
(You can debate whether the authors are all smart. I think that some of them are, but those still do it.)
So we have a society where the blind lead the blind down blind alleys as a matter of course.
Thank goodness that we have resources like Hacker News, to sometimes give a peek at more thorough thinking. (Chaotic though it may be!)
So, to the contrary, I think he's done many things over the past 10 years to make human trials possible!
There are many thousands of biotech companies, the vast majority of which do not sell drugs that treat chronic diabetes.
Any one of them would love to sell a diabetes drug that cures diabetes.
Either this researcher only courted a few companies that already sell diabetes treatments, who unsurprisingly didn't want to fund him (does Comcast fund startups that help you avoid buying cable? NO!) or there is something else about his research that made people not want to continue with it.
She has also cured Type I in mice, although using other means.
And she also got her share of first-class controversy. Cf. http://www.diabeteshealth.com/read/2005/05/01/4126/why-did-t... and the preceding New York Times article "I BEG TO DIFFER; A Diabetes Researcher Forges Her Own Path to a Cure" http://bit.ly/bzUkWs . The JDRF doens't look good in this case at all.
More information about her approach at http://www.faustmanlab.org/
A good overview of other immune-based therapeutic approaches from 2006 can be found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1868847/
It's interesting to follow the scientific debate. The 2006 review sponsored by JDRF claims that the methods used by Faustman offer little promise, and can even be harmful. She offers a completely opposite view, claiming in a 2008 paper
Because our findings showing potential benefits of TNF
or TNF agonism for treating AI, it seems paradoxical
that anti-TNF therapies are a major therapeutic class
of drugs currently marketed for AI. TNF antagonists
have provided clinical benefit to about half of AI patients,
those with rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease. Yet an
expanding body of research in animal models on spontaneous
autoimmunity suggests the opposite strategy may be
warranted. Furthermore, in humans, several clinical
observations deserve mention. First, many Crohn's and
rheumatoid arthritis patients never respond to TNF
antagonists. Second, long-term treatment with anti-TNF drugs
can be accompanied by onset of new or aggravated forms of
autoimmunity, sometimes new autoantibodies, suggesting that,
for some AIs, anti-TNF therapy may not be the drug of choice .To me, the JDRF arguments sound more fishy than hers. It's a tricky business of solving puzzles like that, especially as an outsider. But it's fun to see how far one can go following the debate.
The stringing along of desperate people is WHY the FDA exists.
"Weissman implied that the pharmaceutical companies had put profit over principle, preferring to keep diabetes sufferers dependent on costly insulin than to cure them once and for all."
This is not fun.
I wonder when are we going to agree that you cant make business out of anything.
The bad thing about the internet is the noise level is so high, few will read about such scandals.
I hope in 100 years, advanced hobbyists can do sophisticated medical R&D in their garage and create small quantities of medicine for stuff that big pharma doesn't find profitable (the problem is the government will probably shut that down).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine
It's sort of a French Prozac but with a number of unique benefits that Prozac doesn't have. It's approved in several European countries but NOT in the U.K, and is only available in the U.S on the imported pharmaceutical grey market. Once it goes out of patent, and if it has not been approved for use in the U.S, it will NEVER be approved, ever, for any use in the U.S. That's because nobody would pay the 100s of millions of dollars to approve a drug that a competitor can produce as a generic.
In many cases, the pharmaceutical companies are making billions by selling drugs which merely reduce undesired symptoms. But do not CURE the underlying problem. And the symptom reduction only lasts while the user continues to buy and consume the drug. Therefore, in many cases, these companies have a strong financial incentive to NOT cure a disease, instead, to prolong it and only sell palliatives. Government funding and government directed research should be one of the ways we ensure that we have people actively trying to CURE diseases. It's a classic example of an area where government can do something better than business, because there does not have to be a profit motive. Just a collective desire to reduce human suffering.
This also touches on why it's important to vote carefully in US presidential and congressional elections. Because certain political groups cater to the Big Pharma companies. A vote for them is almost certainly a vote towards a world where there are more palliatives than cures. Where even new forms of ill health can just be considered new "markets" or new ways to increase profits.
Also, insulin requires a subcutaneous injection for delivery. That means a new syringe 3-4 times per day depending on the therapy. Or, you could get an insulin pump at about $5k and pay for insets, tubing, reservoirs and other miscellaneous supplies. Those need to be swapped out every three days.
Want to add continuous glucose monitoring to your therapy? Even more supplies. Add it all up and treating T1 diabetes is nothing close to cheap no matter how deep your pockets are.
The articles describe diabetes patients as floating "shipwrecks": a rudder broken here, a sail there, no one at the helm. It's a good analogy because, when you have diabetes, almost anything can fail without warning.
That one company makes billions selling a treatment for a disease has no bearing on a competing company making a cure for that disease and cornering the market. If anything, it's the very definition of a market-driven solution to a problem.
Now, it's true that there are diseases which are so rare that it's not commercially worth developing a cure, and perhaps government funding is useful in that case but that's a completely different topic.
It's better to share an extremely big market with a competitor than to corner it while making it much smaller. The goal is not to destroy all competition, it's to make more money.
Millions is a trivial amount on what you could throw down the drain and end up with no actual product. It's not vulnerable to a startup as a startup can't practically enter that market. You'd need to be producing something else first.
And small? Not gonna cut it.
Something that works on mice and even something that looks in the lab to cure the disease often doesn't work in trials and doesn't beat the placebo effect.
I also think that if consumers were actually paying the full direct cost of treatments, they would be a lot less willing to pay for a chronic drug habit instead of a cure.
Selling cures can be profitable too.
Consumers are perfectly able to see and pay for the benefits of a one time solution as opposed to a cheaper chronic solution. That's why they buy cars and houses instead of renting them. The market will deliver what the consumer wants if the consumer were making the spending decisions.
Government can't be somehow better than business at deciding what to fund. Its manipulated by business! The current pattern has evolved in a government funded research environment. Only ending the interference in the normal process of making decisions at the consumer level can fix this problem.
In the UK we have a government body http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NICE which oversees which treatments the NHS can provide. This is another way of avoiding paying for treatments rather than cures.
I suspect both a market-based approach, and a single-buyer approach can work. In the US you have a weird government supported insurance industry driven approach with leads to the worst of both worlds.
Inventing then was (arguably) less costly and technical than it is now, because those were low-hanging fruit. A lot of the low-hanging fruit has probably been discovered by now, though we can't be sure, meaning that future research aims at higher-hanging fruit and so, metaphorically, the would-be inventors need ladders.
These people need help, not profit, because profit isn't what motivates them anyway.
EDIT: Let's not forget public health reform can save more lives than just about anything else (thank you Oliver Wendel Holmes/Ignaz Semmelweis http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/AEC/CC/hand_background.ph..., Sara Josephine Baker, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Josephine_Baker and their present day equivalent, Atul Gawande).
Nuclear power? Government. First electronic computer? Government.
Furthermore, when it comes to drug discovery, that 'evil government' has one advantage over businesses, because they have no profit motive. Businesses exist to make money. Period.
No business is going to destroy its market for the sake of the common good. If you're in the business of creating drugs, you aren't going to wipe out a disease with a one-time cure, because drugs are expensive to produce, and palliative treatments are way more profitable.
This is exactly an area where governments do better than businesses, because the reward (improving quality of life) means more votes and support for those in office.
If there really "are plenty of companies that are not selling insulin, so they would be interested to be able to sell diabetes cure", none of them has come forward. This might be because the chances of developing are not good enough, but it sounds to me like you are starting from an assumption ("private sector would jump on this is if it was a good idea") and working your way backwards ("therefore this cannot have been a good idea").
Personally, my belief is that the best funding approach is multi-polar. In other words, there should be some government funding, some private sector, and some non-profit foundation funding. Each of these funders has blind spots, and is frightened by some research while others embrace it. The combination allows the entrepreneurial scientist to push their research forward at each stage.
My cynical side might think that there are people that would go a long way to protect their financial interests.
I imagine "layers of abstraction" may not exist, but common nodes of behavior, clusters of biochemical solutions bound by genetics, MUST exist or we would all be still born.
In principal, you are correct, but you are neglecting one very important point: the government is not a nebulous entity with an endless supply of money. Therefore, the individuals that comprise the government must identify (either directly, or by selecting individuals who are most qualified in a given area of expertise to serve as proxies) the scientists whose ideas, proposals, past productivity, and requests for facilities most warrant funding.
Separating the wheat from the chaff is a non-trivial exercise. It may not be be direct innovation, but I would argue that it is every bit as challenging.
a) A Start-Up has that type of money b) They'll be willing to invest in something so risky.
As others have pointed out there are StartUps with the money, but somehow we still don't hear about orphan drugs with potential to make it burst onto the scene. Why not? I think that the second factor is more at play over here. Ultimately it comes down to the cost vs. benefit analysis.
Imagine this you are a VC with a $100 mil. to burn will you support a long and twisted development process of something that might not even work at the end?
You might argue that the benefit is that you might become the up and coming Google of pharma, but try telling that to any smart VC.
This is why we need something more than a profit based industry for something that forms the basis of our society. On one hand people talk about freedom, and especially how it's related to the freedom of the markets, and on the other you trap them with the very failings of their bodies.
Perhaps, I am wrong, but this is something that we all need to think about. What do we value more as a species money or wealth? I wish I knew the answer.
Imatinib. It was developed as a cure for CML, a disease which only affects a few thousand people in the US. That's just the most notable. From wikipedia's article about orphan drugs,
"In the USA, from January 1983 to June 2004, a total of 1,129 different orphan drug designations have been granted by the Office of Orphan Products Development (OOPD) and 249 orphan drugs have received marketing authorization."
>Imagine this you are a VC with a $100 mil. to burn will you support a long and twisted development process of something that might not even work at the end?
The fact that pharmaceutical startups exist (google pharmaceutical startup or something like that and you'll find plenty of them) show that VCs, or whoever it is who invests in them, have different ideas about risk than you do.
Thanks. I realize my mistake now. I meant it as in how many new companies try something as risky as making an orphan drug? I shouldn't have leaped in with a bad example without checking it more thoroughly first.
Sorry.
>The fact that pharmaceutical startups exist (google pharmaceutical startup or something like that and you'll find plenty of them) show that VCs, or whoever it is who invests in them, have different ideas about risk than you do.
My point over here was that they fund them, but they might not fund something as risky as stem cell therapy. As far as orphan drugs and StartUps go; is there an data freely available online on the composition of companies that market orphan drugs?
Perhaps that would be more revealing?
(I found this site from the wiki article http://www.urchpublishing.com/publications/discovery__rd/orp... , but it's paid)
A therapy that's as good as a cure (such as one that is stem cell based, or otherwise) does seem likely in the next 15 years to me. I've worked on this problem briefly; my role was miniscule, but the basic idea is that you can encapsulate beta cells in an artificially immunologically privileged space, such as an alginate capsule. If done just right, this will let you sense glucose, secrete insulin, and avoid immune attack.
At any rate, yes, I think that we're getting closer to meaningful "post-insulin" therapeutics. Whether or not that will be due to stem cell biology, I don't really know; to be honest, I don't really mind what technique is used so long as it is safe, effective, and maximizes the patients' quality of life.
Here's the lab: http://www.faustmanlab.org/index.html
There's research going on for MS, another autoimmune disease, which also involves getting rid of the autoimmune cells. Here's one approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tovaxin
If they can get this kind of thing right, we'll live to see many autoimmune diseases cured.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/researchers-lab...
http://www.webmd.com/multiple-sclerosis/news/20031022/multip...
Should it not be obvious that such a question exceed the ability of even the most sophisticated doctors and biologists today, not to mention anyone on HN. I'd agree that conspiracy and collusion is always part of human behavior but this doesn't prove that anyone knows the path that future efforts at cures will follow.
The scientists who develop military technology (weaponized nuclear, a nuclear-proof decentralized communication grid, code braking machines, etc.) are simply hired to build it or to weaponize promising areas of reasearch.
Anyone with lots of money and the desire to develop powerful weapons would have developed the innovations you cite. To credit "government" implies that something about the government (other than money and the desire for weapons) is responsible for the success.
Any dictator could do precisely the same thing with sufficient money. Fortunately for those of us in the US, our economic system results in incredible wealth, and the taxes generated by it can buy lots of weapons tech.
It was surprising to see down-voting just on the basis that you disagree with the idea. Welcome to groupthink.
edit: I've found your post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1466419 in which you exclude CERN. Could you give an example for a valid organization?
yes, we have a weird government supported insurance industry driven approach that is quite distortive and destructive. I am fully in favor of ending it and letting peaceful people make their own choices.
The problem is to accept coercion and discover its most beneficent form, not eliminate it.
What people really should be striving for is voluntary alternatives to coerciveness measures, not trying to find the best form of coercion.
In fact, this is exactly how most people live their lives. They wouldn't think of using force against others, except when it comes to defending themselves and the people and things they care about from those who use force against them.
But when people get together in a group, they suddenly feel they aren't bound by the same standards. They somehow acquire rights beyond simple self defense. And history is littered with corpses as a result.
coercion is not necessary to cooperate, to have a society. coercion IS necessary to take advantage others. that does take the use of force. people don't seem to go along with being abused willingly.
And, yeah, drug development is high risk. In other news, the sky is still blue.
Type 1 diabetes is still a pretty big market even if you had a one shot cure. There are hundreds of thousands of type 1 diabetics. If they pay a thousand dollars each (a steal at that price), that's hundreds of millions of dollars. For comparison, there are a few thousand people with CML, but that didn't stop Gleevec from being developed for it (it's very expensive).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atorvastatin (yes, a wikipedia reference)
In addition to the big ones, there are dozens of smaller companies with the cash and the experience in drug development that would jump at the opportunity to cure type 1 diabetes. Unless the risks vastly outweigh the rewards, which seems to have been the case here.
Also, large risks are actually typical for this type of research. It's expensive and risky, so it has to give really large rewards. Research for completely new cures is even more risky and expensive, and the rewards are smaller.
Too bad, because if google had money, and the above rules didn't apply, then google might create a free spreadsheet web service that competes with MS Excel even at the risk of destroying a gigantic cash cow owned by somebody else.
I doubt it. But they're all reviewed by his peers, who made a living by giving endoscopies and prescriptions to patients every year or so.
"Perhaps more important was that the subject, who was none other than Marshall himself, failed to develop an ulcer. Note also that the disease resolved without treatment."
This story suggest that he didn't get an ulcer (but he did get all the first symptoms) and that he didn't treat it with (antibiotics) which he did and which eventually cured his own symptoms (and nearly cost him his marriage as his wife left him shortly after doing this).
http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/E/8270/22025/189048.htm...
"As with many tales of dedicated discoverers, you marvel at the tolerance of the family. When Marshall conducted his experiment on himself, he and his wife Ariadne, a psychologist, had four children aged between 10 and 3. He didn't inform Ariadne, or any of his colleagues, about what he was doing, mainly because he knew they'd object.
“I'm a selfish so-and-so”
“A few days after taking the bacteria I began to feel this heavy fullness after eating, and then on day five the vomiting started. One of the reasons I didn't tell my wife about it was that she had whiplash from a car accident. There was a lot of chaos in the family and in the middle of this each morning I would wake before dawn and run to the toilet to vomit. I had bad breath and I looked terrible. You have to admit I'm a selfish so-and-so to even go ahead with the experiment.”
Ten days after drinking the bacteria, Marshall had an endoscopy and other tests to show that his previously bug-free stomach was thoroughly infected and that he was showing the same signs as his patients.
“At that point I couldn't restrain myself; I had to tell the wife. She was speechless.” He laughs. “But it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” She insisted that he took antibiotics to clear up the infection straight away, though Marshall wanted to continue until he had a full-blown ulcer."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/artic...
Also gastronome enteritis and related diseases was responsible for over 5k deaths (globally) -- a week -- during the period it was known but not accepted 1983 - 1997.
http://www.aips.net.au/97.html
"Marshall swallowed a culture of the bacterium. A week later, he began suffering acute symptoms of gastritis, and biopsies revealed that he had developed both infection with H. pylori and severe acute gastritis. Fortunately, the sequel was a successful case of "Physician, heal thyself"!
further:
"At this stage, bismuth subcitrate was commonly used to treat ulcers, although it was uncertain how the drug worked. Marshall surmised that it might kill the H. pylori bacteria, and he subsequently discovered that a combination of bismuth with antibiotics completely eradicated the bacteria. He then set out to test the hypothesis that elimination of H. pylori could result in a permanent cure of gastric ulcer."
"From 1985 to 1987, Warren and Marshall studied the use of antibiotics as treatment for ulcer. Their finding that 80% of patients were permanently cured of their ulcer if H. pylori were eradicated, proved a landmark in clinical gastroenterology practice. It resulted in a complete reassessment of ulcer treatment, and this therapy is now accepted as an essential part of the management of ulcer disease."
And some patients report that it didn't help. http://www.thisisms.com/ftopict-12463.html
The jury is still out, at best.
They were just bought out for $318M. Not bad.
Treatments for rare diseases actually have fewer regulatory hurdles because of the Orphan Drug Act, which basically says that there's a lower standard of evidence for drugs that treat rare diseases.
>My point over here was that they fund them, but they might not fund something as risky as stem cell therapy.
Maybe not, but maybe that's a good thing, for reasons carbocation stated.
>is there an data freely available online on the composition of companies that market orphan drugs?
There's a list of drugs here (well, do a search on an empty string and you get a list) and the companies who make them, but it's not exactly predigested.
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/opdlisting/oopd/index....
I think the ability to have sex is at least as important as the ability to not piss yourself (e.g. incontinence medication) if not more, but still, its profit center comes from its recreational use. That's why the drug companies love it.
Case in point: I'm an American who lives in Vienna, Austria, and I have recurring upper-respiratory/immune system problems.
Here, I am treated with a so-cheap-it's-almost-free immune system booster called Broncho Vaxom. It's nothing but dead bacteria, but it's extremely effective (essentially an oral vaccine).
It's used to save lives of children in the poorest of nations -- but it's not available in the US, because it's not profitable, whereas continuous rounds of antibiotics are.
So first responders in Florida have a problem. No coral snake antivenom.
A similar market situation applies to flu shots.
The current system favors "maintenance pharmaceuticals", not cures. Who wouldn't prefer to have a cash cow that costs the customer a few hundred dollars every month for the rest of their life, in comparison with something that actually cured them? A cure isn't very lucrative at all.
Generally, free marketeers protest that this isn't true, in the face of all evidence I can see, but look at the business logic; it's inescapable.
and, as its activities destroy capital, government delays innovation. its easy to point to the things governments have achieved. what the people would have achieved had they been freer is not so easily pointed out.
Edit: The NSF started out as a way of enhancing military research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
2) Wut? Do you have any idea on the level of technological transfer that space research brings to your everyday life? This goes from materials that keep your home warm to GPS, really.
3) dude, arpanet is a project of DARPA. WWW is a project of CERN. I got money from DARPA and I study fruitflies for god sake.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
2) Considering the cost of "Man on the Moon" project, the benefits for us are pretty slim. If I take from you, say, $10K, and then give you back $3K, I can claim that you should be happy, because I'm helping you by giving $3K. Right? 3) CERN is NOT a government.
Developing and deploying a spreadsheet is cheaper and less risky than developing and deploying a completely new drug.
Developing a drug is also not cheaper than developing a new type of computer chip for use in tablet computers aimed at disrupting the PC market (all attempts thus far have been failures). So by your logic, Apples A4 chip should not exist.
Amazon received about $100 million at their IPO, and considerable pre-IPO money in the hopes of disrupting retail. Also a very risky proposition, which by your logic should never have occurred.
As an analogy Google Docs falls safely on the treatment side of the fence.
If successful, they will destroy a vastly larger market (commercial spreadsheet software). Google would rather have 100% of a small pie than 0% of a big pie.
Similarly, Diabetes Cure, Inc would rather have 100% of the diabetes cure market than 0% of the insulin market, even if the latter market is bigger.
Etc.
Very quickly: people who need viagra don't like to talk about it, unlike drunken frat boys. The online market is targeting men who can't get it from their doctor because they don't have ED. That doesn't mean the vast majority of viagra users aren't suffering from ED, it just means that online ads are targeting a niche market.
A free marketeer, as you say, would say that the reason nobody is making more antivenin is because the "process for applying" is so expensive - but of course, there has to be quality control, and more importantly, there's every reason to believe that the manufacture would be more expensive than the applying.
Govt regulation is used as a scapegoat. The market for creating this product is just not desirable, because snake bites are extremely rare compared to just about every other medical malady. There was a reason the original manufacturer willingly gave it up in the face of no competition.
Public health is a public concern, and should be funded with public money. It is cheaper in the long run because of increasing working years/tax dollars, and reducing bankruptcies, and reducing the number of orphans, etc.
Even Mr Invisible Hand, Enlightened Self-Interest himself wrote that the whole edifice of his economic philosophy had to rest on the foundation of respect for human life -- and compassion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments
Health is no different. It suffers over the long term when people think the use of force to get some short term benefit.
Somehow we live our lives with the understanding that forcing those around to do what we want would destructive, even if it was somehow benevolent. But collectively, we've convinced ourselves that this cannot be the case.
Perhaps it is because the dominant opinion is actually propagated with our own money even if we don't agree and alternative perspectives buried by the mesh of financing and media access of government.
I like your overall philosophy that coercion is wrong, and in principle I agree with it. I wish that human nature didn't contradict it. Sadly, on every hand I see that actual, real live human beings must be coerced to do good if even the slightest amount of consistency is required.
Even if you want to be cynical about this issue, haven't we been doing this long enough to know that research for military purposes often translates to advances in non-military applications?
EDIT: and don't get me wrong; I would love to see some shift in the way funds are allocated.
In my experience in academe, researchers tailor their work to what the NSF is funding, not what they consider most interesting/important.
I'm talking about regulation and government freely agreed to by people when they decide to engage in an activity in an area. And these rules should be decided upon by those whose property is at stake, not by people who just collect tax revenue off in Washington.
The problem is that no system of property has been worked for territorial waters. So no one has any direct financial stake or right to investigate and sure over pollution from rivers. That must wait until the government decides to give it its fully divided and compromised attention.
Human beings only need to be coerced when they fail to live up to their agreements or when they violate the rights of others. But that is not the wrong use of force I seek to stop. Its authorized by your human rights and by the contracts people freely agree to.
Beyond that, coercion is destructive and should be avoided. There is no right that authorizes its use.
I call that insanity.
The government regulates tightly after a disaster and less tightly as memories fade and lobbyists start manipulating them. Politicians will never be as consistently interested in the wellbeing of the gulf or anything else as those with a more direct interest. Which is why the government agree to a ridiculous limit of $75 million on total liability for drilling, something an owner never would have done.
Its the same story over and over, in industry after industry. Government ignores the risks, disaster strikes, they overreact. And then gradually over time the lobbyists erode every restriction, good or bad.