“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
-- Tom Stoppard
The savvy and prescient Tevi Troy (ex-HHS DepSec) writes about the NIH’s genetic desire to become a pharmaceutical company:
Even though people might differ on the interpretation, most everyone can agree on the underlying and problematic fact that the development of new pharmaceutical therapies has slowed in the United States. The Times story has two charts accompanying its article. One showed that research spending by the large pharmaceutical companies has declined in recent years. The second chart showed that the number of new pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA has been lower in recent years than it was throughout much of the 1990s. The government’s response to these troubling developments is to try to make the NIH into another drug developer, at a time when existing drug developers are having a difficult time getting their products to market.
The sad truth, however, is that this approach has not been successful in the past.
Tevi’s full article can be found here.
