Finally got around to watching her youtube video... shockingly sad stuff.
There were multiple suicides at my school. I know how this works afterwards. Everyone in the school is extremely distraught, and rightly so. But what got me was the people who participated in the culture of exclusion and bullying who then participated in the grieving. It was fake, and it was obvious. They were the people who couldn't care less about the victim because they were popular, and now that someone tragically took their own life they tried to make it about themselves.
I don't doubt that they felt bad. But apparently they didn't see themselves for who they were, and their part in causing the same type of pain that led to the tragedy.
This doesn't have anything to do with what I said. I'm describing the way the market of pharmaceuticals works. It's not even a conspiracy theory, it's just a natural consequence of the way the system is set up currently.
Withholding the magical panacea is not a smart move. What I'm saying is: it's much more economical to try and find new products down the same, downtrodden alley than trying alternative approaches. The pharmaceutical environment is an environment where risk is enormously amplified and poorly rewarded. That is the point. And it's not just the companies that are to blame for this, obviously. Regulators share the blame as well, in particular because they're often affiliated. It makes for much more efficient lobbying with often poor opposition.
I would agree with this. But like you say, the reason for this is risk. And again I would argue that this whole issue puts the onus on government for increased funding of basic research.
Do you think pharmaceutical companies have an incentive to educate people about this?
It would be in their interest, yes. But it probably isn't high on their list of priorities. In the long term it hurts them because when say, a drug recall happens because it turns out it was unsafe, an educated public may not be so reactionary and outraged at the pharmaceutical company.
Part of the problem is that pharma companies do not make a profit from curing or relieving people's ailments. They make a profit from selling pharmaceuticals. If these pharmaceuticals are particularly effective, their sales pretty much dry up (hence, they have a strong incentive not to make too effective products).
I'm going to stop you right there. You clearly have no idea how the drug discovery process works. This is the problem with a scientifically illiterate public. They think somehow drugs can magically be discovered which completely cure diseases but the pharmaceutical companies are withholding such drugs to boost profit. Discovering new drugs doesn't work like you think it does. Most of the time it involves finding a potential drug receptor and beginning a lengthy process of research on it. Remember, 95% of these projects will fail.
So at this point if you happen to be really lucky you may actually know the structure or function of the receptor. Most of the time though you don't know it, so you have to screen up to literally a million different compounds to see if you get a hit. Even if you do know the structure, there is no easy path to a good drug. There are certain structures that are known to be good potential drugs, but at this point it is really good a shot in the dark using high throughput screening.
So now you get some hits that give activity. At this point you optimize these hits by changing their structure. A drug with high activity may have poor pharmacokinetic properties, meaning it can't get to the drug site, or it is metabolized before it gets there, etc. So they take hundreds of compounds and change small parts of the structure and study the changes. Then they may take these drugs and start in vivo tests on mice to see how it works in a living organism. This includes figuring out toxicity. Because guess what? Most drugs are toxic, and a large part of the drug discovery process is trying to maximize the dosage you would need for it to be toxic while minimizing the dosage you need for an effective physiological effect. Then you start clinical trials, etc. like I talked about above. Overall you go from a potential drug target that will fail 95% of the time and go through millions of compounds trying to get activity that will likely not be well understood. It is more like shooting in the dark than it is sitting down and thinking about what molecule would be a good drug and designing one from scratch.
Again, if you buy into this scientifically ignorant conspiracy theory that pharma companies have no incentive to make good drugs you are wrong. Just dead wrong. Where exactly in that process do you think they are making the decision to lower the therapeutic index of a drug? Where exactly do you think a drug company is ignoring a potential groundbreaking discovery to treat a disease? Let me know and I'll tell you why you are wrong.
Quote from Cyan »
If the pills have side effects, they will just give you another pill.
I actually just read a paper about the challenges of dealing with a public that doesn't understand why drugs have side effects. It's interesting because the public doesn't know how drugs are discovered or how they work, so they wrongly think that side effects are just poor design. Wrong. Every drug has side effects. Much of the process of making a new drug is changing the structure to get rid of side effects while maintaining the therapeutic effect.
If they actually cured people(and let's be honest, medical technology could most likely cure most ails at this juncture), their profits would dry up.
More scientifically illiterate nonsense showing that you really don't know what you're talking about.
Reddit is only weird if you really pursue the fringe communities, which for most of the userbase may as well not exist. Normal reddit subs are harmless memes and pictures 99% of the time.
Doesn't journalism do this (write news stories about people who are doing something sketchy but maybe not technically breaking the law) all the time? How is this different, except that it's done by Gawker and not CBS? After all, major news outlets have picked up the story from Gawker and run as much (if not more) personal information as Gawker has.
Teia was specifically complaining that reddit banned Gawker because it was used to reveal personal information of a reddit user.
My opinion is that when you go and violate others' privacy, especially to the degree and scope this person did with /r/creepshots and similar, you have no right to complain when others violate yours. It's an interesting thing when posting voyeuristic pictures of women for everyone to see is considered acceptable by the involved userbase, but revealing the identity of someone doing this is considered unacceptable by them.
I don't think it is acceptable at all. But I support reddits policy of not allowing personal information to be posted. And I will never take you seriously again when it comes to being an advocate against bullying of LGBTs, as you so hypocritically and callously seem to not have a problem with bullying of other groups despite me pointing out that it may end up leading to a suicide some day.
I don't get this obsession with keeping debate out of WCT. It seems like the reason for this is more on principle of the rules than for any good reason. Who cares if it turns into a debate? Is someone being harmed?
Honestly, I'd say Reddit is far worse than 4chan could ever be. It's just a matter of scope when you get right down to it. 4chan has a defined number of subforums with discrete topics. Reddit has as many subreddits as users are willing to create. You're not really going to get, say, 4chan subforums based on jailbait, abuse of women, and whatever other topics. At worst, there'll just be various threads about them, but they won't reach the same heights of popularity and toxicity /r/jailbait and so on enjoyed.
I only subscribe to/look at the SFW parts of reddit. I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable doing this on 4chan (is it even possible?).
So you stand by your disappointment that reddit blocks giving out personal information that could be used to harass or bully people? You really don't think doing so could cause a suicide some day?
Just to touch on this -- there's always going to be more demand for "quality of life" drugs than treatments for rare conditions...it's simply not profitable for large pharmaceutical companies to pursue these. Trust me, as someone who researches a rare disease without a cure, it's a little frustrating knowing that all of our clinical trials and lab studies are based on compounds either administered off-label or found from low-throughput screens at Universities or small biotech companies, but there's really no alternative. It's simply not possible to raise the money to cover the amount of testing needed to come up with a suitable treatment for everything. In order for pharmaceutical companies to stay afloat and sponsor other studies, they need to focus on some of the low-hanging fruit guaranteed to bring in some big bucks.
Although I think we all know the story that Viagra was being developed to treat hypertension, but it just happened to cause increased blood flow to the *****.
R&D - which includes those costs - for most of the pharmas is 30-40% less than they spend on advertising FYI.
For a single drug or overall? Source?
Additionally, most of the costs of final trials (the biggest, most expensive ones) are actually footed by the FDA - and only charged to the company on an APPROVED product.
Trials do have costs involved - but they're a small part of the equation that makes pharmas bad.
Clinical trials are the single most expensive part of R&D, and constitute 35% of the R&D budget for a drug.
Also, you may be interested to hear that only 3 in 10 drugs make enough money to cover their cost to bring to market. Still wondering why they must be so expensive?
[And note, on animal drugs - the testing standards are basically identical just require less stages of trial]
LogicX, I agree with everything you've said (what's your background, by the way? I'm curious)
Chem major but I'm double majoring in medicinal chemistry so I've learned a lot about the drug development process.
and just popped in to say your first line in the OP basically sums everything up. I have a PhD in Pharmacology, so everyone automatically assumes I am an expert in the Pharmaceutical Industry (or assumes I work at a CVS :-/) -- but from what I gather talking to people outside of the sciences, folks mostly don't understand why it takes so long/costs so much for drugs to be made, then don't understand why we can't just make drugs safer. You've answered most of that already, but we can't have it both ways -- either we take the time and money to make drugs safer/efficacious with preclinical studies and multiple Phase I/II trials, or we rush drugs out and deal with pulling them from the market later due to large scale cases of drug-induced toxicity on a more frequent basis.
Also, drug patents last 20 years, so companies often only have ~5 years to actually make money from the drug (most of which offsets costs of other investigated compounds) before generics come out which also explains much of the cost (EDIT: Damn you, CHEESY).
It's a sad but true fact that most chemists involved in drug research will never work on a successful drug. And I would add to this that the costs are only going up in the recent decades as regulations get stricter. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but it does matter in terms of public perception. The public is generally not very scientifically literate when it comes to drugs. This means that when there is a bad side effect they wonder why a company would make a drug with that side effect. In fact, that company should just make their mysterious pills cure everything already! The reality though is that most of this stuff is not absolutely understood.
yes
There is no information.
Finally got around to watching her youtube video... shockingly sad stuff.
There were multiple suicides at my school. I know how this works afterwards. Everyone in the school is extremely distraught, and rightly so. But what got me was the people who participated in the culture of exclusion and bullying who then participated in the grieving. It was fake, and it was obvious. They were the people who couldn't care less about the victim because they were popular, and now that someone tragically took their own life they tried to make it about themselves.
I don't doubt that they felt bad. But apparently they didn't see themselves for who they were, and their part in causing the same type of pain that led to the tragedy.
Finally, a website that reports all known details of Romney's tax plan.
I would agree with this. But like you say, the reason for this is risk. And again I would argue that this whole issue puts the onus on government for increased funding of basic research.
It would be in their interest, yes. But it probably isn't high on their list of priorities. In the long term it hurts them because when say, a drug recall happens because it turns out it was unsafe, an educated public may not be so reactionary and outraged at the pharmaceutical company.
I'm going to stop you right there. You clearly have no idea how the drug discovery process works. This is the problem with a scientifically illiterate public. They think somehow drugs can magically be discovered which completely cure diseases but the pharmaceutical companies are withholding such drugs to boost profit. Discovering new drugs doesn't work like you think it does. Most of the time it involves finding a potential drug receptor and beginning a lengthy process of research on it. Remember, 95% of these projects will fail.
So at this point if you happen to be really lucky you may actually know the structure or function of the receptor. Most of the time though you don't know it, so you have to screen up to literally a million different compounds to see if you get a hit. Even if you do know the structure, there is no easy path to a good drug. There are certain structures that are known to be good potential drugs, but at this point it is really good a shot in the dark using high throughput screening.
So now you get some hits that give activity. At this point you optimize these hits by changing their structure. A drug with high activity may have poor pharmacokinetic properties, meaning it can't get to the drug site, or it is metabolized before it gets there, etc. So they take hundreds of compounds and change small parts of the structure and study the changes. Then they may take these drugs and start in vivo tests on mice to see how it works in a living organism. This includes figuring out toxicity. Because guess what? Most drugs are toxic, and a large part of the drug discovery process is trying to maximize the dosage you would need for it to be toxic while minimizing the dosage you need for an effective physiological effect. Then you start clinical trials, etc. like I talked about above. Overall you go from a potential drug target that will fail 95% of the time and go through millions of compounds trying to get activity that will likely not be well understood. It is more like shooting in the dark than it is sitting down and thinking about what molecule would be a good drug and designing one from scratch.
Again, if you buy into this scientifically ignorant conspiracy theory that pharma companies have no incentive to make good drugs you are wrong. Just dead wrong. Where exactly in that process do you think they are making the decision to lower the therapeutic index of a drug? Where exactly do you think a drug company is ignoring a potential groundbreaking discovery to treat a disease? Let me know and I'll tell you why you are wrong.
I actually just read a paper about the challenges of dealing with a public that doesn't understand why drugs have side effects. It's interesting because the public doesn't know how drugs are discovered or how they work, so they wrongly think that side effects are just poor design. Wrong. Every drug has side effects. Much of the process of making a new drug is changing the structure to get rid of side effects while maintaining the therapeutic effect.
More scientifically illiterate nonsense showing that you really don't know what you're talking about.
No it doesn't, and to the extent that it does; so?
Teia was specifically complaining that reddit banned Gawker because it was used to reveal personal information of a reddit user.
I don't think it is acceptable at all. But I support reddits policy of not allowing personal information to be posted. And I will never take you seriously again when it comes to being an advocate against bullying of LGBTs, as you so hypocritically and callously seem to not have a problem with bullying of other groups despite me pointing out that it may end up leading to a suicide some day.
I only subscribe to/look at the SFW parts of reddit. I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable doing this on 4chan (is it even possible?).
So you stand by your disappointment that reddit blocks giving out personal information that could be used to harass or bully people? You really don't think doing so could cause a suicide some day?
Although I think we all know the story that Viagra was being developed to treat hypertension, but it just happened to cause increased blood flow to the *****.
For a single drug or overall? Source?
Clinical trials are the single most expensive part of R&D, and constitute 35% of the R&D budget for a drug.
Also, you may be interested to hear that only 3 in 10 drugs make enough money to cover their cost to bring to market. Still wondering why they must be so expensive?
I'll have to take your word for it.
Chem major but I'm double majoring in medicinal chemistry so I've learned a lot about the drug development process.
It's a sad but true fact that most chemists involved in drug research will never work on a successful drug. And I would add to this that the costs are only going up in the recent decades as regulations get stricter. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but it does matter in terms of public perception. The public is generally not very scientifically literate when it comes to drugs. This means that when there is a bad side effect they wonder why a company would make a drug with that side effect. In fact, that company should just make their mysterious pills cure everything already! The reality though is that most of this stuff is not absolutely understood.