Look, I'm not an idiot. I know it takes 10-20 years to develop a drug. But I also know that many of the drugs we use now were developed before any of these processes existed. Aspirin anyone? Penicillin?

All of the processes and techniques used by the present-day pharmaceutical industry are predicated on the cultural assumption that, as I said earlier, it's better to let a thousand patients die of neglect than kill one with a drug. In fact, three orders of magnitude may be understanding the asymmetry - it might as well be six.

Once you learn how to do things incredibly slowly, incredibly expensively and incredibly carefully, you're going to be completely ignorant of any way in which they might be done "fast, cheap and out of control."

Very much a parallel situation is the nuclear industry. Does it really take 20 years to design and build a nuclear reactor? Done the modern American way it does. And indeed, there's a much better argument for nuclear overregulation than cancer drug overregulation - still not a good one IMHO.

There's plenty of experience from military programs, even from the other side of the Iron Curtain, that tells us it's not that difficult, slow or expensive to build a nuclear reactor. But if you ask any nuclear professional, you'll be asking someone who knows in great detail how to build reactors the ultra-paranoid way. As far as he's concerned, that's the only way to do it.

Nobody in the pharmaceutical industry knows how to execute effectively with a short OODA loop. The knowledge and experience would have to be created, certainly at the cost of errors and lives. That's a far cry from saying that it cannot possibly exist.

Think about the way weapons are tested and deployed, not in the play wars we fight now but in a real war like WWII. Many, many soldiers in WWII died from unanticipated weapons failure. But if weapons hadn't been developed with the tightest possible OODA loop, we'd have been fighting Tiger tanks with cavalry lances.

We're not fighting a "war on cancer." The military psychology is entirely absent. We're playing a game. As an earlier poster said, "it's an exciting time to be a cancer biologist." Is it an exciting time to be a cancer patient?