Advertising prescription drugs to the general public is forbidden in the EU. Any over-the-counter mood-alternating substances, including sleeping pills must not be advertised, too (speaking of Germany, not sure whether this applies everywhere). In TV ads you mostly see over-the-counter painkillers and meds against digestion problems like flatulences. I have never seen an ad for a clinic either.
I find medicine or health-related ads from the US utterly disturbing. While such laws existed nationally since the beginning of the 20th century, the newer EU laws here were made specifically to prevent a situation like in the US (i.e. thanks for providing the useful bad example, guys).
Not sure if it's EU-wide, but it's certainly the case in the UK too.
Here, we predominantly see adverts for: basic over-the-counter painkillers, cold/flu "remedies" (winter) and hayfever/allergy remedies (summer).
It's really quite jarring visiting the US and watching TV there. Not only because of the seriousness of the drugs they advertise, but also the sheer volume of pharmaceutical ads. I swear it often felt like 50% of the ads were for prescription drugs. Really weird.
On the other hand their TV ads have good comedic value when they spend 3/4 of the ad listing side effects, including the condition the medicine is supposed to cure or death, in a voice over while stupidly happy people play with their dogs and kids. Ask your doctor about Humira.
Anyone feel kinda guilty working in tech? There's thousands and thousands of us trying to make the next app, putting forms on pages, making video games, shopping carts, crypto apps, etc.. We're smart enough to learn biotech and make advances, but the investment just isn't there.
You're not going to find plentiful jobs in biotech. And starting up a new company is nowhere near as easy as it is in tech. I know almost no one from school that got into it. The one person I do know is working on genomic sequencing for race horses..
I hate to say it, but it really needs steady/consistent government funding - both training students and supporting companies. We could be way further along in biotech overall if there were actually a good number of us working on it. No sane investor is going to put money into R&D that will end up failing 9/10 times. And even if you hit on something, the healthcare system is so jacked, recouping your costs are just as hard as developing the product.
I hear ya. I've been a programmer for over a decade and even though I'm making great money and it's intellectually stimulating, I'm essentially giving it all up and diving into biotech (studying now for an M.S. in Bio).
The headwinds are persistent: credentialism and a glut of PhDs that are way more qualified than me. I'm constantly meeting bio people going the other way - into tech.
Despite that, I'm stubbornly going to keep going because like you say, the potential of Biotech to reduce human suffering seems so much greater.
I worry about becoming pigeonholed by my background, or falling into the many pitfalls you point out like screwed up incentives or narrow funding paths. More than anything, I want to work on something important and meaningful, like a disease.
Roughly speaking, my current idea is to learn the basics which I'm in the process of doing now [1], get basic credentials, and then find data on causes of suffering, take the first derivative, sort descending, and go. I know it's naive, but it seems like the right thing to do.
Making advancements in cancer treatment has to be several orders of magnitude more difficult than coding an app. Your point sounds a lot like a relative privation fallacy. That is, if the problem you are solving is not the worst problem then it's not important. If you were to found a successful startup, you could fund research that is important to you. I think the fat cats hoarding cash instead of investing in projects that will further humanity should be the ones who feel guilty, not you.
I can't run a biotech lab in my basement and I'm not interested in looking for funding so I have to run someone else's company.
So no, I don't feel guilty for anything. And despite the general feeling, not everyone in here is trying to build the next Facebook. We're just ordinary guys trying to make a (comfortable) living.
Last but not least, you make it sound like a smartass hacker could discover the cure for cancer or Alzheimer. It's not that easy. If pharmaceutical companies with decades of considerable funding and teams of hundreds of highly specialized scientists haven't figured it out what makes you think that we could? We're smart, sure, but not that smart.
A lot of people I know who worked in bio quit and went into tech, not because they couldn't get a job, but because they found bio research to be unbearably tedious.
Perhaps the real market opportunity is in facilitating this kind of research, rather than just digging another mine.
I moved to programming from biomedical R&D. It wasn't a decision based on economic concerns. I don't actually agree that "we could be further along in biotech if there were already a good number of us working on it", there are a bunch of people working on it and they are very intelligent, but the way projects are managed, communicated and evaluated is not conducive to great and immediate impact and doing research on humans actually has some issues.
Am very interested in talking about the field w/ pretty much anyone though. It has remained quite near to my heart.
You mention that "we could be way further along in biotech if..." What do you consider this to mean, and more importantly - why?
We live at a time when many believe that if there was just enough money and work going into we could eliminate all ailments and be living to 200, if not outright headed towards a Kurzweilian future - which is seemingly radically more far off as the years pass. But I can't help but consider that this optimism is happening at the same time that we can't manage to cure the common cold. And many of the most revolutionary steps we've had in medicine happened many decades and most often by purely serendipitous happening -- and not directed and heavily funded research.
For instance chemotherapy is still the front line treatment for cancer and its discovery came when a couple of doctors noticed that victims of mustard gas in the first World War had surprisingly low immune cell counts. As another example penicillin, the first and father of all antibiotics, was also discovered completely by accident. A scientist accidentally left a petri dish containing some bacteria open. It had been contaminated by some mold from a nearby window, but that mold seemed to have inhibited the bacterial expansion. Lo and behold, antibiotics emerge as a byproduct of mold on rotting decay. It took years for that discovery to be accepted even after the discovery had published and spoken about as much as he could. Probably because it's defies all intuition and is certainly not a path anybody would have ever intentionally gone down, except with hindsight. Vaccines? Similar story. Hey I noticed all these milk maids, that have caught cow pox before, are immune to small pox for some reason. Do other people become immune if exposed to cow pox? Cool, they do!
By contrast, medical progress in recent decades has been extremely asymptotic. Perhaps this could be because we've only spent $x trillion instead of $x+$y trillion, but it could also mean that we are simply hitting a genuine asymptote where we'll continue to be able to make progress but will see ever smaller returns. The current era of extreme optimism is also hardly new. A couple of decades ago nanotechnology was going to be an imminent breakthrough that would cure practically anything, and even revolutionize matter itself. And genetic engineering has been creating promises since its advent. In the decades of promises there the most we really ended up with was some crops genetically engineered to resist an herbicide, which invasive herbs also naturally grew rapidly resistant to. Cas9? We can wait a few years, but I strongly suspect I'll be able to add it onto the nanotechnology pile of 'just around the corner' revolutionary breakthroughs, but they're just around the corner in the same way that the end of MC Escher's stairwells are also just around the corner.
Related to this is addiction treatment, which in the USA is unregulated. Many treatment centers don't actually follow scientifically sound methods for treatment and are little more than an expensive summer camp for adults.
This kind of misleading advertising for privatized healthcare sickens me. It happens for all kinds of healthcare, individual anecdotes used as advertising for a treatment with a low chance or success, or for treatments with no proof of success at all. I saw it just today in the newspaper for a depression treatment service of some sort, which tried to disguise itself as a legitimate article, and essentially tried to guilt trip the reader into thinking that the best option for their friends and family who are at risk of suicide is to send them to this treatment facility.
I'm thinking of compiling a list of conditions that modern medicine treats well, and conditions where doctors try real hard to help their patients.
For example, my neighbor wrecked his bicycle a few months ago. His doctors decided he needed a couple implants to help his leg bones grow back together optimally. I went over to look for my supposedly-delivered package this evening. He's recovering, slowly. Today he was hobbling around with a cane, and told of going to all the rehabilitation he can get (physical therapy, etc). I don't have formal medical training, but I think the rod in his leg was a reasonable intervention.
Trauma surgeons do amazing work in keeping people alive who in prior centuries rapidly expired from similar injuries.
I don't think modern medicine does well with multi-factorial conditions that develop over long periods of time.
Cancer will be a much smaller business when someone figures out how to put it in a more appropriate context, rather than treat it with the tired old war metaphor.
> Cancer will be a much smaller business when someone figures out how to put it in a more appropriate context, rather than treat it with the tired old war metaphor.
As a military officer who researches cancer and has lost a number of friends and family to both war and cancer, I think you may misunderstand both the way we live with and treat cancer, and what war is like. They are quite similar: all the outcomes take time off your life, there is often a significant risk to your life, there is liable to be a lot of blood at some point, and most of it is waiting to die while experts who know precious little more than you mutter and make pronouncements. (and I include myself in that definition of 'expert')
>> "There is a special place in hell for for-profit companies who provide unrealistic or false messages to sick and vulnerable patients in an effort to cajole their business."
That may just be pessimistic, anti-social, misanthropic old me, but what incentive do people have nowadays, in a capitalist, free-market society, to care about the health of strangers when they can maximise their profits by exploiting their illness?
[+] [-] DanielleMolloy|7 years ago|reply
Similar rules exist worldwide: http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/8/09-040809/en/ The US and New Zealand seem to be the only countries allowing this kind of marketing.
I find medicine or health-related ads from the US utterly disturbing. While such laws existed nationally since the beginning of the 20th century, the newer EU laws here were made specifically to prevent a situation like in the US (i.e. thanks for providing the useful bad example, guys).
[+] [-] nicktelford|7 years ago|reply
Here, we predominantly see adverts for: basic over-the-counter painkillers, cold/flu "remedies" (winter) and hayfever/allergy remedies (summer).
It's really quite jarring visiting the US and watching TV there. Not only because of the seriousness of the drugs they advertise, but also the sheer volume of pharmaceutical ads. I swear it often felt like 50% of the ads were for prescription drugs. Really weird.
[+] [-] jobigoud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|7 years ago|reply
In Poland they started advertising those by boasting about "side effects" such as losing weight ....
[+] [-] trixie_|7 years ago|reply
You're not going to find plentiful jobs in biotech. And starting up a new company is nowhere near as easy as it is in tech. I know almost no one from school that got into it. The one person I do know is working on genomic sequencing for race horses..
I hate to say it, but it really needs steady/consistent government funding - both training students and supporting companies. We could be way further along in biotech overall if there were actually a good number of us working on it. No sane investor is going to put money into R&D that will end up failing 9/10 times. And even if you hit on something, the healthcare system is so jacked, recouping your costs are just as hard as developing the product.
[+] [-] schizoidboy|7 years ago|reply
The headwinds are persistent: credentialism and a glut of PhDs that are way more qualified than me. I'm constantly meeting bio people going the other way - into tech.
Despite that, I'm stubbornly going to keep going because like you say, the potential of Biotech to reduce human suffering seems so much greater.
I worry about becoming pigeonholed by my background, or falling into the many pitfalls you point out like screwed up incentives or narrow funding paths. More than anything, I want to work on something important and meaningful, like a disease.
Roughly speaking, my current idea is to learn the basics which I'm in the process of doing now [1], get basic credentials, and then find data on causes of suffering, take the first derivative, sort descending, and go. I know it's naive, but it seems like the right thing to do.
[1] https://freeradical13.github.io/
[+] [-] Flankk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elorant|7 years ago|reply
So no, I don't feel guilty for anything. And despite the general feeling, not everyone in here is trying to build the next Facebook. We're just ordinary guys trying to make a (comfortable) living.
Last but not least, you make it sound like a smartass hacker could discover the cure for cancer or Alzheimer. It's not that easy. If pharmaceutical companies with decades of considerable funding and teams of hundreds of highly specialized scientists haven't figured it out what makes you think that we could? We're smart, sure, but not that smart.
[+] [-] scythe|7 years ago|reply
Perhaps the real market opportunity is in facilitating this kind of research, rather than just digging another mine.
[+] [-] sneak|7 years ago|reply
Do you know what website you are on? It’s closer to 9.5, I think.
[+] [-] arandr0x|7 years ago|reply
Am very interested in talking about the field w/ pretty much anyone though. It has remained quite near to my heart.
[+] [-] WalterBright|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] operon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
We live at a time when many believe that if there was just enough money and work going into we could eliminate all ailments and be living to 200, if not outright headed towards a Kurzweilian future - which is seemingly radically more far off as the years pass. But I can't help but consider that this optimism is happening at the same time that we can't manage to cure the common cold. And many of the most revolutionary steps we've had in medicine happened many decades and most often by purely serendipitous happening -- and not directed and heavily funded research.
For instance chemotherapy is still the front line treatment for cancer and its discovery came when a couple of doctors noticed that victims of mustard gas in the first World War had surprisingly low immune cell counts. As another example penicillin, the first and father of all antibiotics, was also discovered completely by accident. A scientist accidentally left a petri dish containing some bacteria open. It had been contaminated by some mold from a nearby window, but that mold seemed to have inhibited the bacterial expansion. Lo and behold, antibiotics emerge as a byproduct of mold on rotting decay. It took years for that discovery to be accepted even after the discovery had published and spoken about as much as he could. Probably because it's defies all intuition and is certainly not a path anybody would have ever intentionally gone down, except with hindsight. Vaccines? Similar story. Hey I noticed all these milk maids, that have caught cow pox before, are immune to small pox for some reason. Do other people become immune if exposed to cow pox? Cool, they do!
By contrast, medical progress in recent decades has been extremely asymptotic. Perhaps this could be because we've only spent $x trillion instead of $x+$y trillion, but it could also mean that we are simply hitting a genuine asymptote where we'll continue to be able to make progress but will see ever smaller returns. The current era of extreme optimism is also hardly new. A couple of decades ago nanotechnology was going to be an imminent breakthrough that would cure practically anything, and even revolutionize matter itself. And genetic engineering has been creating promises since its advent. In the decades of promises there the most we really ended up with was some crops genetically engineered to resist an herbicide, which invasive herbs also naturally grew rapidly resistant to. Cas9? We can wait a few years, but I strongly suspect I'll be able to add it onto the nanotechnology pile of 'just around the corner' revolutionary breakthroughs, but they're just around the corner in the same way that the end of MC Escher's stairwells are also just around the corner.
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|7 years ago|reply
John Oliver did a segment on the situation a couple of months ago, it's worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWQiXv0sn9Y
This kind of misleading advertising for privatized healthcare sickens me. It happens for all kinds of healthcare, individual anecdotes used as advertising for a treatment with a low chance or success, or for treatments with no proof of success at all. I saw it just today in the newspaper for a depression treatment service of some sort, which tried to disguise itself as a legitimate article, and essentially tried to guilt trip the reader into thinking that the best option for their friends and family who are at risk of suicide is to send them to this treatment facility.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sconklin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teslabox|7 years ago|reply
For example, my neighbor wrecked his bicycle a few months ago. His doctors decided he needed a couple implants to help his leg bones grow back together optimally. I went over to look for my supposedly-delivered package this evening. He's recovering, slowly. Today he was hobbling around with a cane, and told of going to all the rehabilitation he can get (physical therapy, etc). I don't have formal medical training, but I think the rod in his leg was a reasonable intervention.
Trauma surgeons do amazing work in keeping people alive who in prior centuries rapidly expired from similar injuries.
I don't think modern medicine does well with multi-factorial conditions that develop over long periods of time.
Cancer will be a much smaller business when someone figures out how to put it in a more appropriate context, rather than treat it with the tired old war metaphor.
[+] [-] killjoywashere|7 years ago|reply
As a military officer who researches cancer and has lost a number of friends and family to both war and cancer, I think you may misunderstand both the way we live with and treat cancer, and what war is like. They are quite similar: all the outcomes take time off your life, there is often a significant risk to your life, there is liable to be a lot of blood at some point, and most of it is waiting to die while experts who know precious little more than you mutter and make pronouncements. (and I include myself in that definition of 'expert')
[+] [-] milesokeefe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamzk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hasa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
That may just be pessimistic, anti-social, misanthropic old me, but what incentive do people have nowadays, in a capitalist, free-market society, to care about the health of strangers when they can maximise their profits by exploiting their illness?
[+] [-] johnnycasino|7 years ago|reply
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