" But are you saying that you think that the $802 million dollar figure is a valid one?"

Regardless of whether it's correct, I don't think it's a meaningful number. So many factors can change the cost of developing any given drug, and so many drugs fail, that it's not possible to, for instance, give me a billion dollars and a disease and be guaranteed of a cure (or even a treatment). At best you can average what has been spent versus what has been accomplished, to get a sort of mean efficiency figure.

The important points, I think, are that it's not done by entities without massive amounts of capital to throw at often dubious prospects.

" And as for the marketing "copying" -- I'm not sure that's all that relevant with respect to Brazil's National AIDS Plan, which is where this particular thread started."

Well, that begs some interesting questions. For one, did Abbott spend a lot of money to market it in the first place? And did that marketing affect Brazil's choice of that particular cocktail?

Honestly, I'm more than a little dubious about the marketing of prescription drugs. It's one thing for lifestyle drugs a la E.D. treatments, but really, most people simply take the drugs their doctor gives them. Too much of our doctors' information on drugs comes from marketing rather than education - I'm not saying that marketing doesn't educate (the FDA regulates what they must and are allowed to say, and does so much more heavily on the information packets that must be given to doctors), but the fundamental goal is different and that fact ultimately squeezes itself into play whenever possible.

That being said, the fundamental issue is still one of profit - in the worst case scenario, a full cure never comes to light due to research being allocated to areas where companies can make more money. If Big Pharma were so badly misallocating resources to marketing as these conversations suggest, I think they'd be crushed by now.

I also want to touch briefly on government and academic "subsidies" of pharmaceutical research. I'm going to start by separating basic research from specific drug research.

The former, the study of general genetics, proteomics, etc., clearly needs to be in the public domain. Yes, pharmaceutical companies benefit far more than they pay for it, yet it would be incredibly inefficient for each company to have to, say, decipher our genes independently. The federal government has been involved in supporting pure research in virtually every field, to the benefit of virtually every technology company in every field.

The latter - the not-uncommon case of an academic researcher passing a promising drug candidate on to a pharmaceutical with the capital to bring it to market - may very well be undervalued. It's worth noting that this sort of thing happens all the time, and not just from academia; many small companies have started from investment capital, come up with a promising drug candidate, but, unable to muster the millions necessary to test that candidate, sold it to a bigger fish. In fact, the "bigger fish" are increasingly getting their best products through such buyouts. From what I've seen, the academia products don't get nearly as much on their investment as the small biotech startups do; in many cases, this is simply because they don't drive a bargain.

Basically, you've got some guy working on a government grant who wants to help mankind, but reaches a point where he simply does not have the resources to go it alone anymore. This professor is generally not a driven negotiator... Which, if he were, on the one hand, might well drive up the cost of the end product, but also might give the most effective minds more capital to work with.

Okay, I think I'm just rambling now.

I'm so glad I'm not the only person who thinks our future economic success relies on being able to innovate new, high end products - and the top-rate education system required to support that.

" wow, 50% opp. cost

I always suspected their numbers were bogus, but that is more than I'd imagined. ridiculous."

Over, say, ten years (and that's getting to be a short cycle), that's about an 8% annual growth rate; substantially higher than inflation, higher than bond rates, but nothing special - even low - in terms of stock rates over the long term.

While I'm sure the H1-B program didn't help, the internet bubble (and accompanying programmer glut) were the primary reasons behind the huge crash in coder salary a bit over five years ago.

...Why do these feminist haters persist in posting utterly irrelevant comments attacking positions that nobody has espoused in even the general vicinity? And in virtually every story, too. It's weird.