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You would be wrong. Everybody is polite, on to the next speaker, on to the next talk. You can't resolve problems like that. The golden nugget has to be rubbed before it is going to reveal the gold. There is a cultural change that’s needed and in my opinion that only comes from the top.
So who is on the top? Institute directors, the NIH director, Secretary of Health? If every one of you who is in a position where somebody else looks to you for behavioral guidance, looks to you in terms of, are you walking the talk or are you just pontificating? If Al Gore can do it, so can you. [Laughter] What about success? Not much easier. What is in the way in my opinion is the attitude toward risk and toward wide-scale deployment. I had to make up a Hungarian proverb which I do under duress. [Laughter] The proverb should have said that if necessity is the mother of invention, risk-taking is the father of success. Risk-taking is about turning knowledge into success because knowledge is never sufficient to eliminate the need to stick your neck out. You need to hone the reward on risk. And you know, we’ve got systems for that The reward for risk-takers is patent protection. Patent protection is a monopoly, a monopoly that’s given to the inventor by society as an inducement and a reward for taking risks and doing the work to make the invention. The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward should be. Today the public treats just about every invention the same way. An invention to push the enter button on the computer to do something? Good boy, you got 17 years monopoly. You invent an anti-gravity machine? Good boy, 17-years monopoly. [Laughter] Maybe there ought to be some differentiation. There is actually some differentiation in recognition of the unusual time-delays that drugs require. They give you a patent extension, a biological patent extension of half the time from IND to FDA. Maybe what we need is an additional risk multiplier, based on judgment by independent, learned bodies. [Laughter]
And make that risk multiplier sufficiently strong that it can really move people to spend the energy and risk failure for things that are something other than yet another dopamine agonist. The last item is deployment. Deployment is, at best, an afterthought. It is underappreciated and under-funded as an art. It is an art. It has masters and heroes like the invention process
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Copyright © 2004-2007 Parkinson Pipeline Project. All rights reserved. Revised: 03/22/08. |