Comment The important bits (Score 4, Insightful) 81
Some nutter uses a syringe (!) to inject your eyeballs with fish guts in his garage.
Firstly, it's a glorified eye-dropper not a syringe.
Secondly, it's an important biomedical advancement made by citizen scientists. (The important part of that sentence is "by citizen scientists".)
Thirdly, there's an organization which is a nexus for citizen science.
The important bit of this announcement, and the one that makes it interesting to me, is that people are making biomedical experiments on their own, bypassing regulatory agencies and big industry alike.
This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a stagnant market dominated by large monolithic entities. It's usually a small upstart company that's more agile than the big conglomerate, but it works the same in research as it does everywhere else.
For a games-theory argument, consider that the regulatory agencies are free to require any safety requirements at no cost to themselves, but if something goes wrong they are held responsible. As a result we have a system where it costs 2.5 billion dollars to bring a drug to market, so that it's economically infeasable to implement existing cures for rare diseases. It's also impossible for individuals to manage their own risk with informed consent.
For a games-theory argument, consider that health insurance companies see care and maintenance as a cost to be minimized and rates as profit to be maximized. As a result, insurance companies are unwilling to pay for newly minted procedures and therapies because "it's experimental".
(As a concrete example, it tool a loooong time for the insurance companies to consider MRI scans non-experimental.)
So it's not really *surprising* that people are taking things into their own hands and doing their own research, but it's an important development.
Oh, and cue up the kneejerk response from established players about risk, gold-standard regulatory bureaucratic fandom, and how no one without a PhD can possibly do real research.