Playing to be GOD.....It reminds me lucifer
Scientists increasingly agree that we’re fast approaching a moment in medicine—probably within 30 years—where we won’t just be significantly lengthening human lifespans, but probably conquering death too.
If this is the case, then the 150,000 people+ who die every day on Earth is doubly tragic. We may soon look back and mourn these hundreds of millions—our parents, friends, and loved ones—who just missed the time in history of achieving indefinite lifespans instead of ending up in a grave.
What this all means is science is nearing the final leg of the greatest race it’s ever been in. Medicine’s main goal will no longer be to just improve health, but to attempt to guarantee survival for every person that exists on the planet. Unfortunately, one significant challenge to medicine succeeding in this noble life extension aim comes from the most ironic and unlikely of places: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
On average, a new drug takes at least 10 years from creation to arrival in your cabinet in America. Additionally, Matthew Herper at Forbes reports that about $5 billion is spent on average in developing a new drug. New medical devices—especially life saving ones—take upwards of seven years to hit the market. For patients, some who are dying to get the drugs and devices, this may as well be an eternity. Nearly all of this has to do with the FDA and the bureaucratic labyrinth that exists to make sure medicine is safe in America.
Now don’t get me wrong, I also want safe medicine. And for the most part, the FDA does that. But sometimes there are more important things than safe medicine, especially if you’re suffering from a debilitating and terminal disease. For example, many people believe access to medicine before they die is more important than whether that medicine is safe or not. And with such a long, laborious, and costly medical approval process in the US, many inventors and companies that would like to create new medicine don’t do it because of the prohibitive procedure of bearing a product from conception to sale.
It’s no wonder start-up companies are opening shop in Europe and China, where clinical trials costs less and regulations in some cases are more lax. The obvious question is: How long can this continue before another nation becomes the pharmaceutical and medical device global powerhouse?
Imagine if you’re a company, and you have a new heart disease drug that you want to create. You’d have to have cash on hand for a decade (or know you could get it) before you might—if the FDA approved you through its multiple stages—to make single sale on a drug. Now imagine you do the same process in Eastern Europe or Asia, and you only need half the cash on hand. You’d have a far better chance at actually bringing a life saving drug to market and making sure you company can survive until it does so.
There are a lot of reasons for the FDA’s notorious regulatory hurdles. Rather than blame them specifically, though, it’s easier to blame the true culprits—the vampires of capitalism: lawyers. They have made it so that a few deaths from a new drug (even one that helps tens of thousands of people live far better and longer) are enough to make it so that drug makers won’t develop or carry the drug. Class action lawsuits are a reputation killer and simply too much a financial burden.
Credit to Motherboard and Zoltan Istvan
No comments:
Post a Comment