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As someone that works in drug discovery as an academic and has patented drugs, I can tell you that the current process is biased way too far towards safety for optimal life saving outcomes if you look at it in a cold utilitarian way. A lot of lives would be saved by fast-tracking the approval process, despite the fact that there would also be an increase in negative outcomes.

However, it is probably not socially or politically tenable to kill or harm people with experimental drugs even if it saves a greater number of people. Realistically, I don't see things changing much.

I don't think its fair to dismiss this perspective as "written from an emotional place." As Alex Tabarrok wrote above, both Jake and his wife (a medical doctor) were involved with this issue before his diagnosis.




[flagged]


Your account has unfortunately been inundating HN threads with repetitive, off-topic, and/or meta posting.

Since we asked you to stop and you just did another entire thwack of it, I've banned the account.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.


I also love that quote "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" - I wish that concept were more clear to people that are lay people interested in science, but end up practicing scientism in a way that discourages actual scientific thinking.

I am not going to share my work on here- I wish to remain anonymous on here, but am also outspoken about this topic in my public professional persona.


Understood.




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