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I knew it. DNA is made of drugs. |
Would it trouble you – as it troubled me – to learn that there are plans afoot to significantly restructure the National Institute of Health to enable the pursuit of drug discovery because of concerns that the drug companies aren’t creating enough new drugs? Would you feel better if you knew the plans were being spearheaded by Francis Collins, former director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, which he managed to keep ahead of schedule and under budget while identifying the sequence of all three billion base pairs of the human genome in 2003? If the fact that such a disciplined scientist is at the helm makes you feel better about things, how would you feel if you were to discover that he is also an evangelical Christian who founded the BioLogos Foundation, and the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief![]()
? Personally, the only thing that troubled me as I read about the plans to create this new research agency within the NIH was the idea that according to this NYT piece, one of the main motivations for establishing the agency is the fact that in spite of spending billions annually on research, the pharmaceutical industry is cutting research budgets because profits are down. Which should not be surprising, when you ponder the fact that the industry – in spite of historically claiming that drug prices are high to support research – actually spends twice as much on advertising as it does on R & D. Which may also explain why there were only two major mental health drug discoveries in the past century – lithium for the treatment of bipolar disorder in 1949 and Thorazine for the treatment of psychosis in 1950 – and why they still don’t even understand how Lithium works. Which of course hasn’t stopped them from deriving other drugs from it and rushing them to market. In my view, the only concern is do we need more drugs? It will be interesting to see what kind of controversy springs up around these plans; they were quietly announced in December, but they plan to have the new center at the NIH operational by October 2011. What do you think – do we need more drugs, and do we need a government agency developing them?
