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 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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