[sssilver]

What economic / political model would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech? It seems so unsettling that brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.

[JumpCrisscross]

> would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech?

Private pharmaceutical R&D spending in the U.S. is around $100bn per year [1]. NIH spends another $50bn a year on biomedical research [2].

That eclipses total investments into adtech per se, which generously counted shouldn’t exceed $50 to 60bn. (And that only by counting like a third to a half of Google, Amazon, et cetera R&D and capital spending as adtech.) More precisely counted, it probably doesn’t exceed $10bn.

[1] https://phrma.org/blog/phrma-member-companies-rd-investments...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/final-nih-budget-202...

[s1artibartfast]

One of the primary challenges of drug and device economics is the long lead time between capital deployment and returns. One of the selling points of tech is speed to Market.

Factors that would make it more attractive our lower interest rates, higher returns, or faster development.

All of these are theoretically possible to adjust, but the last is most feasible to do in a tailor-made way through FDA review and approval reform. An ambitious example would be allowing conditional Market approval after Phase 2 and treating phase 3 deliverables as post-market commitments.

Advancing the revenue curve two to three years while maintaining the same patent expiration dates can dramatically change the ROI of a pharmaceutical development program.

Beyond this, even conditional Market allowance allows firms to better gauge Market interest and validate Financial investment models sooner.

Similarly, there's also some really low hanging fruit in this area to help manufacturers get to Market faster. For example, the FDA approval of trade names and label content is one of the last steps in Market authorization. Moving this earlier in the process would help products itself sooner and start producing Revenue sooner. Imagine having your billion dollar annual revenue shift out a quarter because the FDA wanted some last minute change to how a cartoon belly button looks in the instructions for use.

[JumpCrisscross]

Totally agree. I’m just pointing out that OP’s precondition is baseless: we do “prioritize this over adtech.”

[odyssey7]

The bargaining dynamics are stacked against biology researchers at every stage of their career, from needing years and years of unrelated performance to be admitted to terribly expensive programs before they can begin to do experiments, to requiring costly equipment and resources to work, to needing to work with a small number of very powerful companies.

As a result, life science researchers are more price-taking than proce-setting when it comes to their wages / salary. If money is the motivator, then the market as-is isn’t addressing this one.

[tencentshill]

The US government funds a lot of these programs, as they are obviously in the public interest. Until one man decided to stop it.

[paytonjjones]

When you reframe ads as "control of human attention" it suddenly makes a lot more sense why so many resources are poured into them.

[abirch]

And when you can measure how effective those ads are in changing human behavior; it's easier for businesses to spend there. As an American, I would love it if pharmaceutical companies couldn't market to consumers. It would free up money for research or lower prices.

[mattlondon]

I said it elsewhere but I'll say it here - we need one of the top 10 richest people in the world - the Bezos, the Musks etc - to suddenly get very interested at a personal level about cancer treatment.

Then the money will flow.

[inglor_cz]

Bezos and several other billionaires stuck a load of money into Altos Labs, an organization that studies aging and longevity.

Cancer prevention is downstream from that, as cancer frequency grows exponentially with age. If you can truly rejuvenate a person, you will also reduce their risk of cancer.

[diordiderot]

Zuck has a lot of money in biohub iirc

[ksd482]

I don't think an economic model would work. Only a political one would work where the government would redirect a lot of funds towards this, making it a lucrative profession.

Adtech works because there is a lot of money in it. There is a lot of money in it because people seek quick entertainment, and we have a LOT of people driving the demand.

Now compare that to cancer research. There's no short term gratification about it.

[tjpnz]

>brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.

And even more brilliant minds are defeating it, every day. I have doubts about how useful they would be in a research lab.

[9dev]

There's a fair bit of frequency illusion involved here. A lot of brilliant human minds aren't, in fact, working on ad tech, and a lot of the people working on ad tech aren't, in fact, that brilliant (as evidenced by them working adversarially against their own fellow humans, for one).

There's a wide world outside big tech, Silicon Valley, and software in general. It only tends to be a bit less visible online.

[strangattractor]

Humans are a bunch of hairless monkeys that have evolved to scam each other rather than hunt and gather food from Nature.

[eecc]

I remember seeing a comic strip about this exact argument but I can’t find it any more

[csallen]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, it's quite an interesting (and important!) question.

Also wonder, outside of politics and economics, whether there's a social and cultural component that can contribute. TV shows, movies, books, and other forms of media that put science and scientists in the spotlight in a positive light can be tremendously inspirational.