PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by Arc, Seaside etc)

Re:PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by... by foonamefoo on Monday February 04, 2008 @02:13AM (#108997)

Phamaceuticals wouldn't collapse; half of their current expenditures go into advertising, half into research. But that only accounts for half of the actual research costs: the rest mainly comes from the NSF. We could just have the NSF give them a 100% handout and cover all the research.

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Re:PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by... by marcus on Monday February 04, 2008 @04:02AM (#109033)

Get your stats right, do your research before you comment.

Pharmaceutical research in the US 2005 34.8B USD federal funds 41M USD. Thats less than 0.12%.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf07335/

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Re:PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by... by scw on Monday February 04, 2008 @11:40AM (#109147)

The NSF isn't the primary fund granting organization for medical research, the NIH is -- with a funding level (28.7B) that eclipses the NSF (5.9B). In 2003, NIH is estimated to have funded 28% of the overall medical investigation costs: http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/...

Pharmaceutical research in all likelyhood includes the cost of bringing drugs to market, currently around $800M per drug. Because of this high barrier, much of the Pharma energy goes into 'me too' drugs of a higher risk/reward ratio, again inflating the true spending on new research: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/what-dont-w...

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Re:PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by... by marcus on Monday February 04, 2008 @02:39PM (#109256)

Yes the NIH is a major source of funding for pharma, although not as big as you think, medical investigation includes a lot that is not pharmaceutical research

The me-too phenomena is a problem but only because of two factors, pressure by pharma reps and the fact that the US is the only country I ever heard of that allows advertising of non over-the-counter meds.

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Re:PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by... by yummyfajitas on Monday February 04, 2008 @09:34AM (#109117)

"Advertising" includes training doctors, not just "ask your doctor about erectinol" commercials.

Hiring doctors to travel the country, give lectures explaining how it works, renting conference centers, providing lunch, etc adds up. Learning how to use a new drug is not easy like learning software; trial and error doesn't work.

A drug is worthless if your doctor doesn't know what it does.

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Re:PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by... by wallflower on Monday February 04, 2008 @11:43AM (#109148)

I know some pharmaceutical reps - they say without irony - that they push (in the drug dealer sense) whatever drug their company wants them to.

America is the one of the only countries that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers. http://tinyurl.com/27y5df

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Re:PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by... by byrneseyeview on Monday February 04, 2008 @02:38PM (#109252)

Considering how arrogant doctors are, and how powerful the placebo effect is, it might make us healthier if we had more advertising directly to consumers and less to doctors.

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Re:PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by... by davidw on Monday February 04, 2008 @12:26PM (#109169)

So in other countries, they simply spend the same money trying to bribe doctors instead of consumers.

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