[citrablue]

What if he is wildly successful and brings down the profitability of future drug development by an order of 10x? And because future profits aren't as certain, investors decide to put their money elsewhere and those drugs aren't ever explored?

I am not suggesting this is the truth, or even a prediction. But I reject the emotionally charged language that people use to say there are no downsides.

There are always potential downsides; it is a dangerous way of thinking to be unable to see possible negativities and use that as certainty of a position. Otherwise, there's just no downside to Pascal's Wager, and we all must believe in God.

[namibj]

The cost of testing a drug for "human compatibility", e.g. the whole clinical trials series, is too high due to how many quality-adjusted life years are saved due to this. Actually, even if you just compare the money the medical system itself wastes on overtesting, instead of using it to help people with existing technology, you see that a lot of this clinical testing money is spend wrong. If we can fix this fearmongering with "bad" medicine, we can reduce the regulation for this and thus allow many more novel drugs to be developed or to spend much less on their development.