It was an informal research project. Nobody wanted to be in the control group.
I think the more important question to be asking is not how much drugs cost, but how profitable a cure vs. treating symptoms in perpetuity would be to the drug companies. I do not believe that drug companies are acting in the best interest of the patient; they have no reason to. This would not be a big deal, but I have to wonder if any potential cures are squelched because they would not generate the same revenue as keeping patients alive, sick, and on medication.
I work in financial services and we get similar reminders periodically telling us to refer all reporters to PR. They’re the only ones in our company that are allowed to talk to the media. It’s just company policy. Likewise, we get extra reminders when something newsworthy about our industry hits the press. It’s not that we have something to hide, just that we’re more likely to get calls from reporters during those times.
I don’t see anything wrong with telling employees that there are people in the company whose job it is to talk to the media and those people alone should handle all inquiries. I’d hate to have something I say get totally misconstrued because I’m not familiar with how to talk to reporters. Aside from that, there’s a lot of information that would cause us to be slapped with fines should we reveal it to the wrong people or at the wrong time. So, to be safe, the company says no one talks to reporters but PR.
That’s not to say drug companies are good or bad, just that telling their employees to refer a documentary maker to the PR department isn’t a bad thing in and of itself.
I’m actually quite confident that I have discovered people overdosed on the sweet, sweet Chron.
Interesting where this thread went from it’s OP. A few interesting responses from people that actually work in biochem or pharmaceuticals and all that’s left is PinkMarabou insulting BubbaDog for his name and trying to defend the efficacy of “street drugs” against medications that have been tested through large double-blind clinical trials. 'Mkay.
Fine, socialize it. Where is the money going to come from for new research, salaries, etc.? Money does not grow on trees and if the government just printed more to satisfy a shortage the dollar would be worth less that a Duetshe Marc before WWII.
Corporations provide a needed service. They provide jobs, retirement plans, pay taxes (that fund those beloved social programs), pump money into the economy, and provide billions of dollars in direct charitable contributrions each year.
I work for the government and it is not a clean ship. The salaries are low, the retirement plan sucks, and the people are mostly incompetant (due to liberal employment practices)… I need a new job.
Back to the point. All you liberals do is cry about how corporations are evil, why? Without money hungry corporations we would all be shitting in a hole, riding horses, dying at 30, and women would be personal property of which ever man their father sold them to. If that is the kind of world you want there are numerous third world countries that you can go to.
I’ve always wondered what it felt like when one’s own head explodes.
Now I know.
From rich people’s taxes. Duh.
Why should the rich people be forced to bear more than there fair share of the burden? You can’t expect a group that already carries most of the tax burden to pay even more. They have as much a right to their money as we do to ours.
They shouldn’t be asked to bear more than their fair share. Ther fair share would be adequate if they were ever forced to pay it.
Now I see what you are getting at.
There are a great number of tax loopholes for those who have enough money to hire creative accountants. That being said, the biggest tax write off is charitable donation. These donations go directly to the organization (some specializing in providing much needed health care services to the poor) without having to go through the government which, as we all know, loves to redirect money to various special interests. At the same time the rich people who make these donations get a portion of it back from the government, a win-win situation.
The problem does not sit with the system, there are many agencies, private and government, that provide low cost or no cost health care and drugs. The problem is educating people who need these programs on where to find them and how to take advantage of them.
Conspiracy theories aside, no drug company wants people poking around. Even if there was no nefarious intent, employees make mistakes and not all mistakes are noticed or resolved. It need not be hiding some hidden lethality but it could be some misplaced paperwork or over looked out of specification on a test. A report to the FDA brings all sorts of trouble, possibly deserved possibly not.
Toss in incomplete statements that could start erronious rumors or letting slip proprietary knowledge, and no company is happy about employees talking with the media who aren’t trained to do so.
As for the money bit, I get soaked in cash, I make 50k for a Masters in Chemistry, 8 years experience and getting bombarded with radiation on a daily basis. Woo-hoo. You need to go up to VP level to make much more than 100k. Damn, we’re raking in the dough. And of course as an owner, I make thousands of dollars per share. Or more like a few bucks a year.
I can only speak for the Canadian system, but the biggest tax write-offs are actually for political contributions, not charitable donations. It will surprise me if the U.S. system differs greatly on this.
As a matter of disclosure I’m a PhD researcher for a large biotech company, and the lack of knowledge here is mind boggling.
Socialize research? We have that. It’s in universities. Everyone gets paid the same regardless of skill. Ask a 35 year old PhD (still doing a postdoc) what they get paid. You wil be startled. They aren’t paid nearly enough to care about their job; very little applicable research is done in universities anymore.
Why can you get cheaper drugs in other countries? Turns out, in many cases, it’s a side effect of company’s generosity. My company has a completely unpublicized policy: No one in any country will go without our drugs because they can not afford it. It is unpublicized because assholes who want to make us into “nazis” will try to take advantage to stick it to the evil corporation, or some such stupidity. We give BILLIONS of dollars of drugs away. We also then sell the drugs for far below market (or development) value to people who can afford something, but not enough. So, yeah, we have to charge Americans more. And yes, we make a profit. You know what profit is? It’s incentive to make another drug. Take profit away and see how many drugs are produced. Sorry, but we have to pay ourselves something, and believe me, researchers in pharm/biotech are not getting rich; we genuinely went into it to help people.
But, MM will fail if he goes after drug companies. Ever wonder why animal rights groups tend to go after universities, and not companies? Hell, we use a lot more animals than any university. Because we have literally thousands of people who took our drugs, had their lives saved, who would LOVE to go in front of the camera and challenge someone to call us evil.
Hey kidchameleon…You make 50K? I’m envious!
I wish I made 50 as a PhD researcher!
Seriously, people. You guys would be shocked at how low salaries are for researchers. We went into it to help people.
I know you’re being facetious, but you are right in this case.
Corporations exist for one reason, and one reason only : to make money. They are not making cancer drugs because they care about your Aunt Ida’s tumours. They are making cancer drugs because cancer is profitable. They are not making viagara because they care about your orgasms. They are making viagara to make money.
If given the choice between alleviating human suffering and profiting, it is their mandate to profit. Period. And yet, we relegate to them the responsibility of fighting to alleviate human suffering.
“Corporations exist for one reason, and one reason only : to make money. They are not making cancer drugs because they care about your Aunt Ida’s tumours. They are making cancer drugs because cancer is profitable. They are not making viagara because they care about your orgasms. They are making viagara to make money.”
Horseshit. I make cancer drugs because I care about your Aunt Ida’s tumors. Making a profit on Aunt Ida’s cancer drug allows us to develop a drug for Aunt Frieda’s heart disease.
I wasn’t talking about you, I was talking about the Big Daddy who pays you to care about cancer. It goes both ways. The money you make every day caring about cancer, could very well have come from profits made off of selling pesticides that cause cancer, like in the instance of Pfizer.
There is no evil guy tenting his fingers and exclaiming “BWA HA HA!” at my company. Believe me, I’ve seen 1000 organizational charts, and I would know who he reports to and who reports to him if he existed.
For all intents, I am my company. I care about Aunt Ida’s tumors. I wouldn’t have spent 7 years in graduate school getting peanuts, and now doing a postdoc and getting paid less than the guy who cleans the mouse cages (not disparaging, just for perspective) if I didn’t get back the satisfaction of doing something good. My coworkers (the rest of the company) is in the same position. We care about Aunt Ida’s tumors. But we have to care about her tumors in the real world rather than the “Let’s hand out drugs for a dollar” world.
The research I do is VERY early stage. It is VERY unlikely to result in even a Phase I study, no less Phase II, III and FDA approval. My research costs the company tons of money. They do this knowing full well that the chance of recouping it is infinitessimal. Incidentally, my research is in an area that would not be profitable even if it DID lead to an complete cure; lots of research goes on in diseases that not many people have. You can’t look at a blockbuster drug and say, well it cost X to develop drug A, therefore the company can charge X + a fair fee and still make a profit. You are missing my research from that equation; you are missing all the research that turns out to not work, or not lead to any sort of drug.
Yes, we make a profit. Yes, we support shareholders. The reason we HAVE shareholders is so that we can continue to make drugs.
Very interesting and well reasoned posts, Fiveyearlurker. You might want to keep in mind that, in some cases, you are talking to people who believe that profit is evil in se.
To further put this in perspective. A lot of work is going on right now in the area of molecular diagnostics. This research is aimed at determining who will respond to a given drug. For example many of the drugs for cancer that have come out in recent years are aimed at specific molecular targets on the cancer cell. If a given patient’s tumor is not expressing that target, the drug is unlikely to help them in any way.
In other words we are putting significant research dollars into actually LIMITING our sales. We don’t want to sell drugs to people who they won’t help. If we were only interested in profit, we wouldn’t bother doing this.