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Comment by larubbio | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure I'm being very pedantic here, but the "no incentive" argument has always bothered me. Saving a life is an incentive. Satisfying intellectual curiosity is an incentive. So the company does in fact have incentives to develop something new without this "privilege." The may have a strongly decreased financial incentive, but that is very different from no incentive.

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You must be kidding. Developing a new drug can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Also note that majority of drug development efforts (>90%) fail, thus each successful drug has to pay for its own development cost as well as the failed ones.

And no, you can't pay for the costs with "satisfying intellectual curiosity"

> Developing a new drug can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

When R&D budgets are no longer superseded by advertising budgets at pharmaceutical firms[1], I will start to find this line of argument compelling.

[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.ht...

That article is about promotional budgets, which is at least subtly different than advertising budgets. For instance, it includes $15.9 billion in samples (which are certainly promotional, but giving patients free drugs does not immediately jump to mind when you say advertising).

The number there is from the figure here:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

Do you mind explaining what's wrong with having advertising budgets? Remember that investment into marketing is tested with the same yardstick as R&D investments - revenue generated per dollar invested. If marketing isn't effective then it won't be done.

Keep in mind that marketing drugs is a purely American thing; in most other countries with sane healthcare policies you can market awareness of a condition but not a drug to treat the condition. Doctors should be the one helping a patient decide which medication is best for their situation, not some ad exec.

No, I'm not kidding, I was simply pointing out that there are other incentives besides financial. I never said intellectual curiosity would pay the bills just that I felt claiming 0 incentive wasn't completely correct. Something along the line of no financial incentive, or greatly reduced financial incentive is better.

Ok. You do realize that each stage of the drug development process is very expensive right? You'll need money for lab mice, clinical trials etc.

How do you suggest intellectual curiosity be fulfilled with no money?

Drug development is fundamentally different from software. There is just no way to do it (either by public or private institutions) without a lot of money.

> You'll need money for lab mice

C'mon, mice can't cost that much.

You have no idea how much it costs to keep a mouse colony fed, taken care of, given veterinary care, etc... and then there's the breeding and genotyping, and treatments. And if they die, you need a pathology report. Mice get expensive fast. These are usually very well engineered mice strains that cost a lot of money just to develop in and of themselves.

And that doesn't even cover their plans for world domination.

Here's a link to Ohio State's per diem fee for mice: http://ular.osu.edu/rates-and-fees/ (It's around $1/day per cage there)

I think you can house up to 5 mice in a cage, and it wouldn't be uncommon for a reasonably sized lab to have a colony of around 200-300 mice. So you'd have maybe 75-100 cages (males you house at a lower rate). So your daily rate at OSU is on the order of $75-100. At other institutions, it can cost as much as $1 per mouse. And this is just for housing them. You start getting to real money, real fast.

I wish humor came across better sometimes; you took my comment way too seriously.

Err, what?! Companies don't exist to save lives or explore intellectual curiosity. They exist to make money. Therefore we do have a responsibility to try and make the profit motive line up with more humanistic motives.

A strongly decreased financial incentive is disincentive in a system where

1) Equipment and the necessities of life cost money, to say nothing of opportunity cost. Even the most ascetic lab rat can't eat good feelings and intellectual curiosity.

2) If you're looking to raise capital, E(ROI)>0 makes it 100x easier to raise 100x as much capital (perhaps this is exaggerating, but capital markets are MUCH larger than charity markets).

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