I wrote this substack post due to my growing frustration with European innovation landscape compared to the US. We seem to follow technological development with at-least about a decade gap. Particularly when it comes to medical research, but others also. That is, if activist groups and political lobbying even allows it to be developed (see chatgpt being banned in Italy).
There is also regulatory burden when it comes to research. In the past year only, it has become exceedingly difficult to do any animal experiments in the Netherlands. This makes sense given the aim of completely 'phasing out' animal research by 2025 . I really hope the new minister of agriculture (Femke Wiersma), from the farmers party, can put a stop to this. I do not understand how supposedly intelligent people believe that animal research can be 'phased out'. Indeed, it is very easy to challenge them on this and receive no satisfying reply. This to me makes it seem more like 'feels over reals' sort of thing. I think a part of the regulatory burden is in part to ensure that the science aligns with ideology, which is perhaps why some places in the US are possibly worse than others.
I am not sure how much this explains. Of course with animal research its easy to say that it explains all of it. But things like GDPR and the research ethics stuff (for human research) seem more influenced by safetyism and ass-covering to me. Here, caution and risk avoidance have become virtues, which makes sense given the median age. I always remember back to the AstraZeneca debacle. Some very very small increase in chance of clots for a certain age group and if you were in this age group you could not get the vaccine full-stop. No matter if the statistics showed that things were actually on the net, positive, or whether you were tired of living under abject tyranny and saw this as a way out. You, as an adult could not make a decision regarding your own well being. Faceless bureaucracy did this for you. Likewise, currently when running any human experiment, it doesn't matter if you want to very much participate in an experiment.
If you have 3 kidneys and the MRI can see this, people can identify you and so this is personally identifiable information and therefore your 'informed consent' means nothing. I see 'consent' as a legacy of classical liberalism. We are paying lip service to it. But actually the consent of the paper pusher, is much more important here than that of the individual.
I really think the current trajectory is ruinous. As I finished off in my post, there are very real consequences to being left behind on the technology game.
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Notes -
I am not regulation fetishist unlike EU leadership but...
For GDPR for me "to hell with marketers and data leakers" is a convincing justification.
I was looking through some fines issued under GDPR and applaud them in general.
Every time I bring my car in for service I have to sign a form allowing them to read out my car's computers and send the data to the EU. EU laws say they can't use my data without my affirmative consent, but EU laws also say they're obligated to send all my data to the EU when they work on my car. So every time they give me a form and every time I sign it. I could withhold consent, but then it would be illegal for them to work on my car. That's EU regulation for you. But luckily my privacy is safe.
Big companies will do what they want anyway and the fines are just taxes by another name.
yes, and this case specifically thing I hate is taxed - that is why I like it
Another thing I like about GDPR is that fines scale with size of company, so even Google and FB cannot just ignore it
"4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year or €20 million, whichever greater" maximum fine is not toothless.
FB is so far winner with €1.2 billion fine (probably still being appealed, not sure about actual value).
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Isn't the problem here mass marketing? The same regulations basically seem to apply across the board, irrespective of the amount of data, nature of the data , or the usage of the data (non-commercial, research). The nature of the data in our case is very clear. Data obtained during human experiment, under informed consent, with a very real physical signature of said consent document.
In such case GDPR should not be a problem, right? Beyond cost of adding and having GDPR-specific incantations in the consent document.
GDPR is pretty vague, so there's a massive chilling effect in which whenever there's a remote possibility that might run afoul, <don't do thing> is the only winning move. Basically anything that might be considered AI (by a clueless bureaucrat) is currently an example of .
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GDPR doesn't really say "to hell with marketers" it says "to hell with marketers that can't make a browser with high adoption rates".
I admit it is not ideal, but at least Google provides something that is often useful.
And as far as "to hell with marketers" this was the most likely one, deeper EU-wide partial outlawing of ad industry was not plausible.
Google might be useful, but they've already shown they're more than happy to use their power to manipulate their users.
That's actually an argument in favor of Google for the EU, but it's clearly against the public's interest.
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Don't worry too much. Americans have been shouldering the worldwide cost of medical research for decades now. This isn't some new phenomenon. We pay for it, then everyone else gets to use it.
There are huge regulatory problems in the USA as well, the companies just have the right to charge enough to profit enormously even with those hurdles in place. It hurts everyone here, but at least we get some results sometimes. There is room for massive reform.
Does Europe respect American drug patents?
From my understanding its more they dictate prices to the pharma companies as stewards of national public health systems.
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Huge regulatory hurdles and huge costs followed by huge payouts is a model with its own problems. I'd much rather have small crowdfunded teams advancing tech then releasing their results for free so that we end up with advancements that a private individual can replicate. Various science youtubers have shown that real progress can be made this way (though somehow I see more of this progress happening in biology than in AI). I want to see more of that.
Do you have some examples? Big pharma sucks but it delivers more than random bio hackers.
I am thinking of random biohackers. People like The Thought Emporium.
Big Pharma definitely delivers things that random biohackers don't, but how much of that is talent capture that then ends up community funded by insurance anyway? I'm likely not well read enough to know the proper solution. But I know I hate this system and want to fund people who are willing to give a non-revocable free license for all their results.
My anger is speaking here to an extent but I'd rather take an OOM drop in quality if it means the producer of the content actually loves me and doesn't see me as just another object to be exploited. I suspect big pharma misses out on entire classes of easier solutions because easy solutions don't sell. ie- Were there a wild leaf you can chew on to cure cancer Big Pharma would be incentivized to neglect it and find something different enough to be patentable instead. Their results are largely worthless to me if I can't trust their motives not to be rent-seeking.
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Thank you for the article! I think you're right that regulations intended to protect private data seem to have undergone significant overreach and is now producing results that look deeply stupid. There's probably some reason why they're like that, but even so it seems like we should either burn them and try to redraft entirely, or submit them to some sort of sortition-based test where the bare bones of an appealed case gets presented to a random member of the public and if they say "that's stupid" then the appeal is granted.
OTOH, when you start talking about cowboy researchers, I get uncomfortable. America may be the land of xenotransplantation and artificial kidneys, but let's not forget that it's also the land of top surgery, lobotomies and Theranos. The role of Doctor blends 'healer of the sick' and 'engineer of human flesh' in awkward ways that can produce cowboy doctors with dangerous god complexes and overly trusting / suspicious patients. I don't have a strong conclusion, just musing.
On a tangent, phasing out animal research is doomed and stupid, but I think it could be cut down pretty heavily without any real loss.
I've worked in an adjacent area and from where I'm standing hundreds of millions of rats and mice go into the PhD thesis grinder for very dubious benefit. They're a lot better treated than wild rodents or livestock for the most part, and the laws protecting them (in the UK) are solid and sensible, but I don't like seeing huge numbers of animals being born and spent for work that even the authors think is basically unnecessary. At least meat brings people pleasure and nutrition.
The higher animals (cats, ferrets, monkeys) are much more expensive to buy and maintain, and require more specialised attention and facilities, so they're a rare commodity and people don't use them unless they have to.
I agree that cowboy in this regard can be both good and bad. There is a book called 'How to make a killing' which looks in to the flip side of the coin. Where basically doctors were the first ones to commercialize dialysis, and attempt to maximize profits from it. Of course, different cowboys at Seattle were the first to have a dialysis ward for chronic dialysis patients that would otherwise die, using the shunt invented by them, without the intent of profit maximization but maintenance instead.
Its obviously a mixed bag but I feel like we are sliding more and more towards things being harder to develop. I think this is a shame and potentially, in the long term, dangerous. There must be a way of reducing the regulatory burden and safetyism without producing these negative effects. Or the system is basically unstable and you will slide to one extreme or the other.
I am unsure about the animal research part. I think things that could be done without it, should be. This is what I am trying to do to some degree with in-vitro blood testing setup for the blood filtration membranes (its hard, blood is weird and weirder outside the body :D). I think in-vitro is always going to be cheaper and likely better controlled, if you are clever about it.
But I do wonder if the authors thought the work was unnecessary prior to their results. If so, why did the work happen in the first place. Goodness knows there are a lot of bullshit proposals out there. I generally think a lot of science is muddling around in the dark and sometimes something works. Thats for the majority of the mortals. Therefore most of the time the tools we use for this (animals perhaps) were 'wasted' if we hit a wall, atleast on the individual level. But on a macro-level it seems like a part of the process.
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