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> real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in their own children Certainly everyone's mother was killed by cancer who works on cancer. And no, not everyone who works at a Big Pharma company is terrible, but the problem is more that Big Pharma is concentrated on improving their current prescription systems, rather than finding a cheap one-off cure. If Big Pharma wants to stop acting like a giant faceless evil monster, I will stop treating it as such. But how can you really justify current medical costs without saying that someone, somewhere in that industry is doing something disingenuous? > The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation. The problem is that there isn't enough demand to justify the cost, if we're doing it in a "if a person is diagnosed, they pay for it" manner that capitalism demands. Cancer research costs many, many billions of dollars due to many factors [1]. Say we're talking about leukemia research. 40,000 cases were diagnosed this year [2], but should each of those cases have to pay for the extremely high costs of research? Or, could we distribute it in a way such that each citizen pitches in a much smaller amount to help cancer research? In my opinion, the latter makes more sense, rather than punishing those who get sick. Lastly as for credibility in the research world, there are definitely lots of examples I could look up. And also plenty of examples to look up for your cases that you mentioned as well. I think it would be too hard to count, no? But when you see things like the Tobacco Institute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute#In_popular_cu...) it's hard to say that we should research everything privately, because the conflict of interest is just too high. In my opinion, publicly funded research could / should be reformed, but there's not as obvious of a bias one way or the other there. [1] http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jan2011/nci-12.htm
[2] http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/leuks.html |