I get it, arguments of sacrifice sound hippy and antiquated, and I picked a couple of touchy or cliched examples. But supply side manipulation can't solve complex problems like this. If you can balance your equation by also tweaking the demand side, you suddenly have many more potential solutions that don't rely on science fiction technology for supply. Just because folk live in a world that increasingly utilizes electricity doesn't mean we actually need all of those sources around us to still maintain a high quality of living. The author points to the demand side solution herself at the end of her article. But if these arguments sound like unacceptable sacrifices to you, how would you propose altering the demand side?

Good call. Do we need to keep store signs illuminated at night? Do we need to optimize all of our refrigerated sections of food retail to display everything in them at the cost of good insulation? Do we need to be able to open our refrigerators at any moment of the day and keep them open as long as we want? How about Appliances for things that could instead be done by hand - dishwashers, clothes washers. Not everyone has to be a Luddite, but the demands we place on the grid are absurd in some ways.

The problem, as alluded in AC's reply above, is when a pharmaceutical employed scientist makes the discovery and can't publish it in peer or public access journals. As this is through a national research institute, further funding and publications are likely forthcoming.

It doesn't matter if it isn't approved. If there is a mechanism published in the science literature to treat the disease, someone will be able to experiment with it in another country. Think about some of the African/Asian countries who have said to hell with Western patents on drug formulas and make their own. If a country can produce these compounds then they most likely have the means to run clinical trials.