Blaming difficulty of problems on capitalism alone is disingenuous. There are huge scientific projects that are not profitable and still done because there is a somehow clearer path forward (ex: UKBioBank, CERN, ITER).

When I hear "{x} is not very profitable" I think people mean "we are not sure if we succeed doing {x} and it requires us to divert lots of resources from other things that we think would be more useful".

Pharma companies invest already huge amounts in drugs and many fail anyhow. Quote: "It takes 10 to 15 years and around US$1 billion to develop one successful drug. Despite these significant investments in time and money, 90% of drug candidates in clinical trials fail." (https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/opinions/031222/90-of-drug...)

That quote itself seems to be disingenuous, conflating "one successful drug" which costs $1B with "drug candidates in clinical trials." Even more so when taken from context, as the next sentence in the article is

> Whether because they don’t adequately treat the condition they’re meant to target or the side effects are too strong, many drug candidates never advance to the approval stage.

And that doesn't sound "successful" at all. How much money is sunk into R&D at the point of failure is the much more relevant statistic to consider. If the pharmaceutical industry wasn't wildly profitable, they'd be investing those billions elsewhere, leaving drugs to a slow-cooking niche.

There is no claim that each drug costs 1$ billion. If you stop after 1-2 years of development you might have wasted some millions, if you stop after 3-4 years you wasted tens of millions and so on. The 10% success is still very low, because you can still fail after 10 years (potentially investing a lot)

If you are interested in the topic, for example for oncology: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... , to quote "Failed drug development in oncology incurs substantial expense. At an industry level, an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion is spent annually on failed oncology trials."

There is no "oracle" that says invest 50 million (or 100 million or 1 billion) in X or Y and it will succeed (in pharma or other domains). And this is not exclusively because of capitalism, it is because doing some things is hard.

Socialism would be even worse for research.

> Socialism would be even worse for research.

So is black and white thinking. There is more to a spectrum than both ends.

It's not an either-or. There are other systems that do not lie on the same line, such as the Islamic financial system.

How is the research in the non-capitalist environments comparing?

Which non-capitalist environments?

When that question was more easily answered you could probably have pointed to macrophages.

Any of them, but let's preempt the arguments.

Outright "communist" states like Cuba and Venezuela no longer have sponsors, and are sanctioned by the US, so they're exempt from having to prove that their economies could conceivably generate any innovation.

Right-wing "post-democratic" states like Russia and Hungary are, by some definition, capitalist, but you see no innovation there either. Presumably someone if not you could blame America for them being unable to innovate. One could equally say that their markets aren't free, because they're fully captured and manipulated by their respective mafia/oligarchies.

Ahem. Just like the so-called communist countries are.

Then of course there's China. Where capitalism is also a plaything of the governing power. Similarly, no major drug developments have come out of there. Although we did have a fantastic example recently of how not to manage a biolab doing gain of function research.

Pray tell, which countries without free markets do anything at all? I'm not holding my breath for North Korea to cure cancer, no matter how much of their GDP is spent trying to keep their Dear Leader alive.