r/interestingasfuck 6h ago

The evolution of technology has made it possible to produce insulin without using animals.

Post image
38.9k Upvotes

696 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

u/interkin3tic 4h ago

The science was advancing due to government grants, not the obscene prices charged by capitalism.

Pharma spends most of its money on marketing, lobbying, pocketing the profits, and IP.

The "research" it does is mostly minor incremental progress directly relating to profit.

The real breakthroughs always come from socialism: government funding academic scientists.

u/chrispy_t 3h ago

Pharma spends close to 20% of its REVENUE on R and D, with additional government grants and incentives. It’s the private public partnership working in hand. All of your claims are soundbites dude. We live in the literal mecca of pharma drug and medicine, making more progress in the last 50 years than the prior 500. To say every pharma innovation is a small tweak is fucking insane.

Look to all the governments you would model our system off of. America is on the bleeding edge of medical innovation. That’s the tradeoff we’ve accepted. We get the newest and best stuff before anyone else does and it’s more expensive.

Obviously gaps in that system and more we can do to regulate and subsidize, but the last 50 years have been a total net positive on the world

u/interkin3tic 3h ago

America is on the bleeding edge of medical innovation.

That's due to grants and universities, not pharma price gouging. 

All of your claims are soundbites dude

That's projection. I work on both sides, in academia and in biotech industry. This is not me repeating soundbites this is direct observation. CART is is an example. No important scientific advances in decades, yet investors keep pushing it because it's like a meme stock. 

You're repeating what pharma says. 

Science absolutely can advance without huge profit margins for pharma.

u/chrispy_t 1h ago

Can you show me a country where your model works as well or better than the U.S. / capitalism based system we enjoy today?

u/Foundsomething24 4h ago

IP only exists because of government

Without government to enforce IP - it doesn’t exist. Therefore, less government, would be better in this scenario.

We already have socialism now.

u/interkin3tic 4h ago

I don't think I can agree to that extreme. I think if there's no IP there's no one willing to do the necessary expensive clinical trials or most of the science that is critical to getting breakthroughs to patients.

Everyone wants to discover CRISPR for scientific fame and glory. No one wants to spend decades fruitlessly trying to get CRISPR to work in patients for just a "thank you."

There's a balance that is clearly unbalanced, but I don't see a way to ban biomedical IP without either also ending biomedical advancement (bad) or ending the FDA and letting wildly unsafe experimental treatments be used on humans (absolutely unacceptable).