While biomedical research has historically produced a great deal of value, the situation today is more ambiguous, and it appears that the average biomedical researcher does little to advance the field.
Basically the field of biomedical research is in a crisis. Big Pharma companies rather rebuy shares and lay off workers than making strong investments into the future. In the pipeline is a blog that gives good news about what’s going on in the field. Posts that are very interesting are: What Sanofi thinks of you with is about the Sanofi CEO who says: “The reality is the best people who have great ideas in science don’t want to work for a big company. They want to create their own company. So, in other words, if you want to work with the best people, you’re going to have go outside your own company and work with those people”
Given that he heads one of the biggest Pharma companies the idea that the best people just don’t want to work in his company, might give you an idea of the state of the field.
The post on Eroom’s law about how the price of developing new drugs rises exponentially is also worth reading.
On the plus side we did make progress on the front of gathering more knowledge in form of gene sequencing. It just seems like there no straightfoward way to reap huge returns from that knowledge.
If we want to stay alive and not die in a 100 year timeframe due to aging there a lot of work to do in developing paradigms that can actually bring us to the place in towards which we want to go.
At the beginning the biological community was not found of the molecular biologists. To quote Sydney Brenner who did work in the field in the beginning: “To have seen the development of a subject, which was looked upon with disdain by the establishment from the very start, actually become the basis of our whole approach to biology today. That is something that was worth living for.”
That’s sort of what being at the edge of a new field should feel like. When going today into Biomedical research the goal shouldn’t be to replicate what people are already doing but to find a new way of doing things.
As a society our choices are really: We die as individuals somewhere in the next hundred years or we get our act together and actually find a productive way to deal with biomecial research.
The problem is too important to avoid directing some smart people into the field, even if the field doesn’t perform well at the moment.
Basically the field of biomedical research is in a crisis. Big Pharma companies rather rebuy shares and lay off workers than making strong investments into the future. In the pipeline is a blog that gives good news about what’s going on in the field. Posts that are very interesting are: What Sanofi thinks of you with is about the Sanofi CEO who says: “The reality is the best people who have great ideas in science don’t want to work for a big company. They want to create their own company. So, in other words, if you want to work with the best people, you’re going to have go outside your own company and work with those people”
Given that he heads one of the biggest Pharma companies the idea that the best people just don’t want to work in his company, might give you an idea of the state of the field.
The post on Eroom’s law about how the price of developing new drugs rises exponentially is also worth reading.
On the plus side we did make progress on the front of gathering more knowledge in form of gene sequencing. It just seems like there no straightfoward way to reap huge returns from that knowledge. If we want to stay alive and not die in a 100 year timeframe due to aging there a lot of work to do in developing paradigms that can actually bring us to the place in towards which we want to go.
At the beginning the biological community was not found of the molecular biologists. To quote Sydney Brenner who did work in the field in the beginning: “To have seen the development of a subject, which was looked upon with disdain by the establishment from the very start, actually become the basis of our whole approach to biology today. That is something that was worth living for.”
That’s sort of what being at the edge of a new field should feel like. When going today into Biomedical research the goal shouldn’t be to replicate what people are already doing but to find a new way of doing things.
As a society our choices are really: We die as individuals somewhere in the next hundred years or we get our act together and actually find a productive way to deal with biomecial research.
The problem is too important to avoid directing some smart people into the field, even if the field doesn’t perform well at the moment.