I don't see where the "market" part comes in. Just the "free" part.

Nevermind the fact that Washington University, the school that created the Foldit program, is a public (that is to say, funded by the state; a.k.a. statist) institution.

Nevermind the fact that healthcare, up until very recently, has been privatized (excluding medicare and medicaid) for a substantial time now; yet the lifetime cost of HIV medications and treatment is roughly $385,000.

Shouldn't free market generic meds have landed in your local Wally World for $5 a month by now? Why is the free market dictating these insane prices where how much you can pay is directly relational to how long you get to live.

Maybe if these drugs were mass produced... but herein lies a new problem: New HIV infections have been reduced by 17% over the past eight years! Urgh that's what you get with big government. Free market thinkers know the bigger your customer base is, the better it is for business, and the consumer therefore is the ultimate winner.

Now, as we know, if the market was not worthy, pharmaceutical businessmen would not get involved with it and essentially let the project die. The logical solution to these huge dilemmas in cost then is to create a larger customer base. All they need now is a furtive way to deliver the virus to a sect of the population that is either expendable and large or rich and small.

What's that little Timmy? Blankfist's bullshit posts give you AIDS of the eyes when you read them? Well it's a start. FREEDOM!

>> ^JiggaJonson:

Nevermind the fact that Washington University, the school that created the Foldit program, is a public (that is to say, funded by the state; a.k.a. statist) institution.


Right, and I'm sure the researchers there are fantastic. Still, they opened the market to allow more people to work on what they themselves and others weren't able to succeed at.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

Nevermind the fact that healthcare, up until very recently, has been privatized (excluding medicare and medicaid) for a substantial time now; yet the lifetime cost of HIV medications and treatment is roughly $385,000.


And available only from big pharma. And that's thanks to government regulations. Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine privately and offered it without patent. If he were to bring the same drug to market today by FDA restrictions he'd have to pay millions.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

Shouldn't free market generic meds have landed in your local Wally World for $5 a month by now? Why is the free market dictating these insane prices where how much you can pay is directly relational to how long you get to live.


The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated. I think you're erroneously conflating corporatism with free market.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

Now, as we know, if the market was not worthy, pharmaceutical businessmen would not get involved with it and essentially let the project die. The logical solution to these huge dilemmas in cost then is to create a larger customer base. All they need now is a furtive way to deliver the virus to a sect of the population that is either expendable and large or rich and small.


Again, you're claiming the current market is free. If it was, people like Salk could enter and compete (much like the gamers in the article above) without retribution from government. What you have today is a limited amount of pharma companies that can compete in the market, and because there's less competition, you have higher prices.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

I don't see where the "market" part comes in. Just the "free" part.


The market is just a system of exchange. Look at my example of Salk above. He developed and released a cure to polio, but today the restrictions on the market makes this kind of charitable action illegal. But in regards to the article specifically, Wash. Univ. opened their system of exchange and asked the online gaming community to help in figuring out a complex structure of an AIDS protein. The exchange was charitable. That's the free market.

Now if there was a regulation against this sort of thing because the online gamers weren't "licensed" for instance, then that would be a restrictive market. Right?

This has diddly to do with a market, free or otherwise.

@blankfist

"I'm sure the researchers there are fantastic."

You are such a hypocrite. In your post you praise the discovery, and now you bash the university that made it all possible with a snide bit of sarcasm.
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"He developed and released a cure to polio, but today the restrictions on the market makes this kind of charitable action illegal."

What EXACTLY are the restrictions that prevent someone from independently researching and independently developing a cure for a disease; and then openly publishing information about said cure.

And before you say "Well the FDA piles on regulations/fees DURRR, that's what my article said!"

Your article also said "Some observers would say that reducing FDA restrictions would reduce the price of drugs consumers face. I do not believe this to be the case. After the R&D is spent, firms price their drug to maximize profits subject to consumer demand."
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Incidentally, the polio vaccine you referred to was also discovered at a state university.
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We have lived in a world without the Pure Food and Drug Act. All it led to was maximization of profit through insidiously horrible work conditions, disgustingly inferior products for consumers, and the publication of The Jungle.

@JiggaJonson, huh? I'm not bashing the researchers or university. No, I think what happened here is a huge breakthrough, and I wish we'd see more of this type of ingenuity.

And Salk's research was funded privately, I'm afraid.

Lastly, the FDA restrictions are prohibitive. It costs well into the millions to get a drug passed into the market. The article I cited explains the costs, but the section you quoted is opinion. I like to stick to the facts, thanks. And the facts are that only a handful of big pharma companies can compete in the market. I defy you to prove otherwise.

Hmmm, perhaps I misinterpreted you when you used the word "still" in that sentence. I thought you were suggesting something else; that was my mistake. Regardless, this ingenuity was made possible by state institutions and not surprisingly didn't come from the University of Phoenix or similar for-profit schools.

I never said that the state university fully funded his research (you must read, grasshopper), I said it was discovered at a state university. Surely the university loaned him a hand here and there.

There are 34 different pharmaceutical companies in the United States currently. Not one of them pulls down less than 1.6 billion dollars a year. The average revenue of the bottom ten pharmaceutical companies is 2.4 billion. The top ten make at least 10 billion a year in revenue with Johnson and Johnson pulling down a whopping 70 billion in revenue.

Assuming your figure is correct, even the smallest of the pharmaceutical companies in the US would have access to producing something like the polio vaccine if the current cost to bring drug to market is in fact $802 million. ESPECIALLY when you factor in that all of the research and development costs will be privately funded by charitable donations like the March of Dimes, as in your polio example, the costs would be minimal. I still don't understand why you think a smaller pharmaceutical company would shy away from production/distribution of a drug if it was all already paid for through a nonprofit like the March of Dimes.

Oh shit did I just blow up your whole argument? Boom motherfucker.

I don't think this has anything to do with the free market... and I work in this field.

^free market = free exchanges between people without coercion. Work experience is irrelevant.

[Terrible Joke Omitted]

>> ^JiggaJonson:

There are 34 different pharmaceutical companies in the United States currently. There are 34Not one of them pulls down less than 1.6 billion dollars a year. The average revenue of the bottom ten pharmaceutical companies is 2.4 billion. The top ten make at least 10 billion a year in revenue with Johnson and Johnson pulling down a whopping 70 billion in revenue.


My point exactly. They're making a killing because there's such little competition in the marketplace. 34 doesn't seem like a small number to you? There are more mechanics in your hometown most likely.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

Assuming your figure is correct, even the smallest of the pharmaceutical companies in the US would have access to producing something like the polio vaccine if the current cost to bring drug to market is in fact $802 million.


You're missing the point. Let's remember what this blog was about: what I'm assuming is more than 34 companies or schools have researched the AIDS protein for over three decade and they weren't able to do what the unlimited gamers online did in three weeks. That's opening the market. I know accepting that causes some unsettling cognitive dissonance, but there it is all pink and naked.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

I still don't understand why you think a smaller pharmaceutical company would shy away from production/distribution of a drug if it was all already paid for through a nonprofit like the March of Dimes.


Because instead of spending $800 million for one drug, they could spend $800 million for who knows how many drugs. Ten. Fifty. Maybe hundreds. Thousands? $800 million is a lot of money.

Especially when it's "cost of doing business" the large pharmaceutical companies probably wrote into the law when their lobbyists got the legislators to pass it. I'd much rather pay $800 million as a rich corporation so only the rich investors can compete with me. That ensures less competition. And the less competition, the higher the profits for an inferior product. As one of the 34 I'd prefer that to compete with hundreds of companies.

And private charities won't cover it all. You need investors. And if you're an investor with minimal capital who can't afford the risk of the $800 million price tag, you'll probably not invest. What do you have against competition? Don't you agree that more competition would be better? Isn't that what we've seen with the gamers?

What did they call those guys who cook up shit in their bathtubs and go around selling it town to town in a completely unregulated (free market) environment? OH YEAH!

Snake Oil from Zina Saunders on Vimeo.

@blankfist [edited b/c I didn't like my original comment]

You can't have it both ways.

Either
"Salk's research was funded privately, I'm afraid"
or
"Private charities won't cover it all"
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I'd also like to point out something interesting I dug up in the process of this discussion. While the polio vaccine was being tested on schoolchildren, before regulations went into place to prevent such a thing, 10 children were killed and 164 were paralyzed for life as a result of a bad batch of the polio vaccine being administered.

"The Salk vaccine was licensed at a time when we basically didn’t have vaccine regulation in this country. The government learned that having 10 people oversee vaccines, and frankly doing it on a part-time basis, was not good enough. The Cutter incident was a painful lesson about the fact that we needed much better oversight." - PBS's American Experience: Polio

"Investigators soon learned that all the sick children had been injected with a bad batch of vaccine, made in Berkeley, California. After a hasty and poorly staffed government screening process the vaccine had been deemed safe. In fact it had contained virulent live polio virus." - Same PBS link as above.

You left out the part where schoolchildren died or were paralyzed for life because of lack of oversight.

@JiggaJonson, we have snake oil salesmen today. Homeopathy is just that. Herbal potency pills are too. And many people think asparagus is an aphrodisiac. People are still trying to sell their inferior products to the masses, but the real problem with snake oil salesmen is that they usually came on a horse drawn carriage, and after selling to their marks they were gone. In today's society, most people can and do get their drugs from a brick and mortar store. If someone sells them something purporting to cure something and it doesn't, they could sue for fraud.

But this is a huge distraction from what we were talking about. At the end of the day, opening up the research market to the world and allowing global competition did in three weeks what top researchers couldn't do in decades.

The free market works. The more eyes we can put on a cure or solving a problem, the quicker we get results and the more it helps society and medical progress. Who would be against that?

It's been said already, but I'll say it again. 'Free market' doesn't apply here. They didn't just release their data and ask someone else to do it for them. FoldIt is a crowd-sourced protein-folder. It's a fancy version of the programs that spammers use to crack CAPTCHAs: you farm the problem that's difficult for a computer to do out to human labor. This is no different from the researchers hiring computer time at Amazon or releasing an @Home distributed computing program to get more computer time. The only novel thing here, that makes for a good headline, is that it's in the shape of a video game on the labor's end.

That's what it was the last time I played FoldIt, anyway. Is there something different here?

They could sue for fraud if they're not dead because said disease hasn't completely overtaken them. All of your lofty ideas for how awesome a completely unregulated market would be come crashing down the second businessmen whip out their cost-benefit analysis charts.

You are the one conflating ideas here. The free market doesn't automatically mean that more eyes will be on every problem; it just means most eyes will be on the most profitable problems.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

They could sue for fraud if they're not dead because said disease hasn't completely overtaken them. All of your lofty ideas for how awesome a completely unregulated market would be come crashing down the second businessmen whip out their cost-benefit analysis charts.
You are the one conflating ideas here. The free market doesn't automatically mean that more eyes will be on every problem; it just means most eyes will be on the most profitable problems.


I'm glad the rest of the world doesn't have your cynicism when it comes to human endeavors. Chicken littles who live with so much fear are miserable people in real life. I hope you're not one of them.

People tend to want to do the right thing. There'll always be bad apples, but those are the minority. The majority of us receive endorphin rushes from doing good and feel symptoms of depression when we do bad. Evolution has made us caring of others. It gave us empathy. And when we open the playing field up to 350 million people instead of a handful of corporations, we're doing the right thing.

@blankfist First off, it's an ad hominem attack to suggest the possibility that I'm very cynical and miserable.

And so much to sticking to the facts. People tend to want to do the right thing? Bad apples are the minority? That must explain the fact that roughly 90% of US homes own guns and how and 68% of violent crimes in the US involve guns.

Either these collective owners are eating the "do good" sunshine and lollipops that come out of your ass and ONLY use their guns for target practice, or they bought them for home protection/to commit a crime.

Grasp them straws, bud.

Yeah I'm the one grasping at straws.

You lack the courage of your convictions sir.

And you DARED to compare yourself to Thoreau !!! He went to prison because he didn't want to pay his taxes. You're just a spineless coward full of theory without any action.

Keep on payin those taxes, pawn of the oppressor.

I just hope you're not as cynical and miserable as you may or may not sound. Last word.

I imagine if we lived anywhere near one another, conversations would end like thie