[refoundable]

Author here.

I interviewed Jack Scannell on the hypothesis that the man who wrote the now famous paper on Eroom's law would likely have many more insights to offer that didn't necessarily make it into print.

One of the oddest things about biotech and pharma is that cures trail improvement in technology by at least a couple of decades. That's terrible news if you're a patient/consumer though maybe great news if you're a lab technician.

[eganp]

Hey refoundable - great interview! Love Jack's characterization of Alzheimers as chemical roulette.

Just wanted to let you know there's a typo in your first figure. "Thalyidamide" should be "thalidomide" [0]. It's also been sold as Thalomid.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

[refoundable]

Thanks for the great catch. Fixed.

[andrewjl]

The article mentions poor incentive structure around development of better disease models as an obstacle for some of the drug categories, is that an area where either the federal govt or the industry as a whole can step in and develop a collective solution?

[refoundable]

That's certainly what's implied by Scannell's answer to Question 8, but such a solution comes with its own set of limitations related to design by committee.

Small startup teams are still the most effective way to solve hard problems in our society, and so I suspect that any definitive solution would likely be built and sold to the industry by such a team.

[beloch]

The way your website handles font-size and zoom is really weird.

[titanomachy]

I feel like there should be a named law of hacker news for this. There's sometimes more discussion about how the page doesn't work without javascript, font colors are bad, page is slow, whatever, than about the content of the article. Although in this case most people are talking about the article.

Agreed though, there's some weird responsive CSS going on here that makes it impossible to resize fonts on a desktop.

[refoundable]

I echo both observations and urge you to name that law.

Will look under the hood at the CSS.

[jhayward]

Thanks for looking. I use the "zoom" feature of Chrome to make fonts more readable. The CSS on this page does not permit resizing of the type - a major faux pas for accessibility.

This is a fascinating article, and is even better with the conversation here added. Thanks for your efforts.