Resident evil the umbrella corporation how realistically is it

Factual Questions
1

Okay I understand it is movie and scfi and every thing in the movie is way beyond today’s level of science.

But that got me a idea not so much what they do in movie or the science in the movie!!! but got me thinking do we really have building with thousands of people working on different medical problems.

That say building with 1,000 people doing medical research.

floor 1 HIV
floor 2 TB
floor 3 lung cancer
floor 4 pancreatic cancer
floor 4 chronic bronchitis,Emphysema and Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Some how I think in real world it is not like this because of two major problems

  1. We like to spend more money on wars and giving bureaucrats living like big king
  2. Shortage of doctors and researchers

If such government built a building like in movie resident evil you never get 500 people working that alone 1,000 people because of the shortage of doctors and researchers.

In the real world a researcher cannot say I’m going to be working with 50 researcher doing HIV research and that is it.

So the idea of the umbrella corporation sounds awesome :eek::eek: I just think in real world it comes down to .

  1. We like to spend more money on wars and giving bureaucrats living like big king
  2. Shortage of doctors and researchers

So in the real world you lucky to get 1,000 researchers doing research in a country not some building. In the real world you are ** lucky to get 50 people in world working on lung cancer not some floor of building**.

So in real world money and shortage of doctors and researchers why the idea of umbrella corporation would never become reality.

2

Not a corporation, but NIH’s Bldg 10/CRC in Bethesda, MD is fairly large. And, there are labs working on all kinds of things. Not sure how many people work in the building itself, but there could be a 1000 PI’s. And that’s just the biggest building on the campus; there are many others.

As far as an actual corporation, Genentech in S. San Francisco looks a lot like a modern university and I bet there’s a ton of individual labs there.

http://orf.od.nih.gov/AboutORF/BFM/Pages/10Beth.aspx

3

So a quick look at NIH on Wikipedia showed this:

Over a 1000 PI’s and 4000 postdocs, and then there techs, staff scientists, and grad students.

Although, NIH has other research locations around the country, so those numbers may be country-wide.

4

I do tax returns for a nonprofit promoting research of a particular disease - and this disease is nothing like lung cancer in scope. They have 7 grants for research at this exact moment (totalling about $400,000). Most of these grants are for research being done at universities, and it’s safe to assume that there are multiple people doing work under each grant. And this charity isn’t even a national organization. They really just cover the greater Seattle area. Some of their grants are in cooperation with other charities for the same disease.

So… let’s extrapolate: assume that 30 major cities have similar charities. Each supports 7 researchers… we’ll ball-park it that 200 researchers are working on this disease that affects only about 1 in 200,000 children. To think that there aren’t 50 people working on lung cancer is ludicrous.

5

Sounds like it, note “extramural.” My paycheck is mostly funded by NIH. I am not an NIH employee.

6

I used to do lung cancer research, and there were 5 in our lab at the time–and this was at a tiny place–so, yeah, 50 people is pretty ludicrous.

Try searching PubMed for lung cancer to see how many labs have published something in the last week.

7

There’s extramural and intramural. I did my postdoc in an intramural lab in Bethesda. NIH also has sites in MT and NC, and there’s something in Baltimore, some NIA labs I believe.

At grad school, our dept had PI’s with NIH extramural funding, so their postdocs were on that, I think.

8

If that the case no wonder why there are long wait times in the ER. Most all be going into medical researchers.

I know many people that have to wait two or three months for hip or knee surgery because of shortage of doctors.

And people who have to wait 4 to 8 hours in ER to see a doctor.

9

You’re still getting movie science and real science a bit mixed up.

There’s not really a shortage of researchers the way you describe. Each of the major pharmaceutical companies has thousands. They aren’t organized the way you describe. Tossing 100 researchers onto a floor doesn’t serve much of a purpose by itself. That’s a kind of movie science expectation.

I also don’t see how ER wait times are related to a lack of doctors. Many doctors don’t want to work in the ER. They can make more money in other specializations, like cardiology or neurology. So, they go where the money is. While that’s related to money, it’s more about salary than money available to pay them.

Worse, citing ER wait times on a lack of doctors ignores a lot of other factors, like people using ERs as substitute for medical insurance. That’s not about a lack of doctors.

Ditto wait times for replacement surgeries. A lot of these surgeries are naturally performed on older people. That means dealing with Medicare and finding doctors/hospitals that accept Medicare and jump through the appropriate hoops. That’s less about an absolute lack of doctors and more about a lack of doctors that want to deal with that particular situation.

We absolutely do have thousands (millions worldwide, actually) working on biomedical research. If the results don’t match a video game/movie company, well, that’s the difference between fictional science and real world science.

10

Okay this is what I’m confused so researchers may be doing more than one research at a time? So it is not like movies 100 researchers working on lung cancer they are doing other research other than lung cancer.

I know one other thread when researcher comes up with drug a computer model that may work it could take 15 to 20 years of testing and research to see if the drug works or not.

What does the researcher do well testing or clinical trials are underway to see if the drug may work or not.

Is there enough money for researchers to have say what they want to do research on

Could 1,000 researchers say all I want to do is research on chronic bronchitis,Emphysema and Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease? Or would they say no you have to do other research.

11

There are a lot more questions there than you realize. But here’s a few points:

-I think the overwhelming number of researchers is likely to be PhDs, not MDs. MDs are involved in research, of course, but most are “just doctors.”

-Research and Development are two different things, despite being linked. For instance, if one scientist discovers a molecule that targets a specific item of interest (say, a structure in heart muscle) that’s great. But that molecule has to be manufactured in quantity, formulated into something that can be handled, shipped, stored, etc., and test methods must be developed which can prove the product’s quality. There may not be an MD involved in any of those, but each one requires a different scientist because they are all different specialties.

-Labs are staffed by a variety of people, ranging from HS graduates (who may have simple jobs like preparing solutions, organizing, etc) to BS/MS who often carry out the actual work, to MS/PhD who direct the work, design experiments (or review the experimental design of their more talented BS/MS reports), and do varying degrees of hands-on work

-Researchers may work on multiple things or not, really depending on the complexity of what they are doing.

-When drugs are in the clinic, the work does not stop. Drug development is conducted on multiple parallel paths, such that we may have a product in the clinic (being given to patients experimentally) even while we evaluate long term stability, develop more robust manufacturing processes, work on improving the manufacturing yield, etc. Also, every use of the drug in the clinic generates TONS of work. Patients and their responses must be evaluated, followups have to be scheduled, etc. Interestingly, when in the clinic is maybe the only part of the process where an MD is actually necessary

That said, most MD researchers I have known work on projects early, in the discovery phase, and then hand the product development off to someone else (whether an existing company or one that is formed for the purpose).

I know it’s sort of stream of conciousness, but I really just wanted to help people understand how Pharma R&D really works. It is much more of a grind than “Eureka”

12

This is the part that’s really more fiction than reality.

What does it even mean to “research lung cancer”? For one, lung cancer isn’t a single cancer. Lung cancer in a life long smoker is going to be different from that found in a non-smoker who was exposed to asbestos or somebody who has a family history, i.e. genetic, of lung cancer, or somebody who was exposed to radiation and got cancer that way.

You don’t just study all that in a big mass. That’s a lot of different causes and different, though related, diseases and diagnosis and treatment should reflect those differences.

So, what exactly would these researchers be “studying” together? Each one may be “studying lung cancer” but really they’re going to be researching their little subproblem.

It’s like college. While it’s true that a physics major studies science, telling somebody “I study science” is misleading. There’s not a “science department” where you learn all of science. They study physics. And at a low level. Now, let’s say it’s a graduate student. It’s still misleading to say they study physics. They are now focusing on a narrow area within physics (astrophysics? geophysics? particle physics?). And say they want to get a PhD and do research for the rest of their lives. Then, they aren’t just studying that narrow area but a sliver within that area.

Medical research is going to be like that. While it’s true that somebody may “study” lung cancer, what they really mean is they work on their own particular small part of a problem that, combined with other problems, addresses one single (of many) part of a particular lung cancer. It is true, however, they may be looking at several little problems at the same time.

Take a look at this image. “Lung Cancer” is going to be a big circle. Any individual researcher is only doing one of the small bumps.

And that’s on top of OldOlds point about the different backgrounds and training of researchers. Tossing 100 biochemists into a room is well and good, but in reality you’ll want a mix of different specializations, including biochemists and cell biologists and medical doctors and whatever else, and that includes different levels of training and education. Labeling them all “researchers” as if they’re interchangeable is one of the hallmarks of a movie scientist.

That’s how movie “scientists” are like MacGuyver. Somehow, they’re all experts at a wide range of sciences and can somehow engineer solutions to your problems with no tools, no expert training, and without really even looking closely at the problem. Yeah, put 100 of those in a room together, and they’ll cure cancer. But they also don’t exist in the real world.

It’s a comedic site, but this one is a pretty good description of some of the differences.

13

Right.

I could introduce you to an analytical chemist who is downright famous in his field. He’s a PhD who knows anything you could imagine about LC. But he probably doesn’t know where the spleen is or what a quark is.

It’s about like assuming that a portrait painter and a house painter are the same thing. Actually, they are closer together than an analytical chemist and a biologist of any sort.

14

I should also bring up another hidden assumption.

There’s an underlying expectation that every scientist is a hidden Archimedes or Newton waiting for their “Eureka” moment. That they just need the time, money, and colleagues to perform miracles on a daily basis.

That’s still movie science.

Real scientists are normal people. They have jobs. They have hobbies. They have families. One in a million (actually less) may be a real legitimate genius who can change the world.

For every one of those, however, are 999,999 regular Joes who don’t change the world and never could, even with all the time and money they could ever want. Put 1000 of those in a lab, and they’ll do solid work but there shouldn’t be any expectation they’d somehow come up with miracles cures just because they’re in one place now. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

15

Good points. When I start talking about what kind of research I’ve done to non-scientists, or even non-biomedical types, there’s always a risk their eyes will start to glaze over if I get to detailed explanations, so it becomes “We’re looking at how these compounds affect lung cancer cell growth” or some thing similarly simplistic.

The comic was pretty funny :slight_smile: I’ve always wondered why in TV shows the labs are so dark; probably so you can see the cool LED lights and computer graphics on the equipment, but good luck finding that tube you just dropped.

16

One of the largest privately-owned medical research organizations in the world is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They spend something like $800 million each year but they don’t have a giant building with a thousand scientists working in it. Instead, from looking at their website it appears that they have about 500 scientists working at universities all over the country. My guess is that it’s cheaper to sponsor a scientist at an existing university than to build your own lab in which that researcher can work.

17

NIH is humongous. The campus itself is over 300 acres and, as of 2003 had 17,511 on-site employees, according to this report. They’ve added several buildings and a few thousand more employees in the dozen years since.

18

The Hatfield Clinical Research Center (CRC) addition to Bldg 10 opened in 2005 and basically doubled its size.

19

There isn’t a shortage of researchers. if anything there is a glut of people trained in STEM fields who would be willing/able to work in R&D if the jobs existed.

Also we do spend more on war, but not by much. I think the US spends about 4% of GDP on military, about 3% on R&D. In many other wealthy nations both numbers are lower, closer to 2% each but it varies by country.

Either way, here is biopolis in singapore. it sounds a bit like what you are asking about.

Also when I was in college each science building had several floors full of labs with professors, post docs, grad students and undergrads working on research. However I went to a state flagship university in a mid sized state (I think that campuses research was considered top 10 or 20 or something in the nation). So that may be an outlier, but evenso you could find tons of labs and floors full of labs where I went to college.

20

Wow!!

The US better start spending more money or will lose it to the Chinese.