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 -
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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