Actually, the problem is that if an investment doesn't pay out for over 10 years a 200% payout is actually kind of skimpy. When you factor in risk of complete failure, you really need more like 1000% for it to make sense to start spending.

Some of that is because most new antibiotics aren't really all that new. The one on that list with the shortest "shelf life", levofloxacin, is a fluoroquinolone. We had already been using fluoroquinolones for 25 years by the time lefofloxacin came around.

And that is why biotech is funded by VC firms and eccentric rich folks.

drug testing in China seems to have hit some hiccups though. Too many fraudulent trials.

Oddly enough Cuba is actually a player in biotech, and has invented a treatment for malaria amongst other things.

But if you look at the big advances from over the past 30 years. PCR? Corporate. Cure for hepatitis? Corporate. Advances in DNA sequencing? Corporate.

And you can pull those same numbers for other companies and find that as an industry Pharma spends more on R&D than any other as a percentage of revenue. Sure, Google and Intel beat them but they are the outliers of the tech world, not the average.

So let the people with hepatitis die until Gilead finds a treatment for c. diff too?

The subsidies didn't get cut (well, maybe for a year or so during the last recession), they even increased faster than inflation most years. They just haven't grown nearly as fast as the cost of research. The concept of "low hanging fruit" applies big time to drug discovery, and the fruit that are left are much harder (and more expensive) to pick than the ones people chased in the 70's and the 80's. That said, year in, year out, about 25% of new drugs are invented in academia, principally through public funding. They are then licensed out to Pharma for the expensive part: clinical trials.

The solution to that will be private hospitals with much better hygiene and isolation of patients. And if you have to ask then no your insurance won't cover them.

Untracked freemen? The most valuable use of tracking will be of c-suite executives. At $1k per hour and up, their time is far too valuable to leave unexamined. And seeing as they are getting so much of their work done while out of the office (on the golf course, over drinks, etc) it would really be best if they were just tracked all the time.

Replace "smoker" with "assembling search terms for patent searches for drugs for different diseases every week" I

If you are on T-mobile (I have been for about 16 months) calls will frequently go to your voicemail because there is no service available for your phone when you are: in a large building, on a subway, in a suburban area, in an urban area ...

It does seem to work, but since all of your data traffic is now through mobiwol, aren't you trusting the owners of the app with all of your data traffic?

The original manufacturer, because the buyer would remove your label and then serve all his friends a bottle of "$400 Pappy Van Winkle", all of whom would now think "Jeez, this stuff tastes like $14 Evan Williams (cause that's what you put in the bottle). Don't think I'll every buy any myself".

Similarly, authors and musicians. After all, the new novel by Pepty could just be printed by J. McDonald Press and sold on Amazon right beside the ones printed by a publisher who actually paid me.