On Drugs

clipped from business.theatlantic.com It's not like much that comes from Washington will solve our problems, either, even assuming that the administration wants to try. The research productivity drought isn't going to be ended by any fiscal or regulatory initiatives, because those aren't what got us here. The causes are complicated, and not everyone agrees on all of them, but I think that most of us in the labs would agree that (for one thing) we've used up a lot of the (relatively) easy drug targets. We don't even have a good idea of what causes many of the diseases that we'd most like to tackle. For another thing, we've learned a lot more about potential problems with drug candidates, but not so much about how to fix them. Aspirin, acetominophen, and penicillin wouldn't have made it through a modern drug discovery effort. We'd have found their problems early (intestinal bleeding, liver toxicity, and anaphylactic shock, in that order), and either killed them off or spent years trying to get around them.