A brilliant lecture by James Robert Brown outlining how pharmaceutical companies have stagnated medical research and are detrimental to innovation.
Here is an article corroborating his insight, that although, the popular anti-depressant Prozac is essentially nothing more than a placebo, except in the most extreme cases, its and other drugs in same class have continued to be prescribed by doctors around the world.
Medical research and information is so tightly controlled by pharmaceutical companies that our rate of innovation for every dollar spent on research has actually decreased - a sort of a reverse Moore's Law, aptly called Eroom's Law. And we call it progress...
The same extension can be applied to oil companies researching alternative technologies or tobacco companies researching the effects of cigarettes or coal companies debunking global warming. Scientific research has been bought, its authenticity and sacrosanctness pillaged, and we are none the wiser.
Face it ladies and gentlemen, the "Free Market" has failed Science, we should accept it.
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