Seems like there needs to be a DARPA with a cancer focus, funding only high-risk, high-payoff projects with people routinely replaced on a 5-year or so basis to mitigate bureaucracy formation.
Although individual projects typically last three to five years, major technological challenges may be addressed over longer time periods, ensuring patient investment on a series of focused steps and keeping teams together for ongoing collaboration. Continued funding for DARPA projects is based on passing specific milestones, sometimes called “go/no-go’s.
From the DARPA website:
To maintain an entrepreneurial atmosphere and the flow of new ideas, DARPA hires Program Managers for only four to six years because the best way to foster new ideas is to bring in new people with fresh outlooks. New people also ensure that DARPA has very few institutional interests beyond innovation, because new Program Managers are willing to redirect the work of their predecessors – and even undo it, if necessary.
DARPA is a sinkhole for money and brainpower that produces practically nothing of market value. The DARPA model is what's wrong with healthcare R&D.
It is the unavoidable nature of government programs to be very expensive and slow. The major medical advances will come from the private firms that minimize entanglement with the government.
I'm with you in principle on the nature of government programs, but the private sector is notoriously short-sighted. Witness big pharma's focus on weight loss, painkillers and erection maintanence well beyond active reproductive years.
There needs to be some vision beyond short-term profits to incent drastic leaps.
Perhaps venture capital should given incentives. If there are breakthroughs coming they'll only happen through funded companies.
The other possibility, which I'm sure is unpopular to utter around here, is that there are no cancer breakthroughs to be made in a reasonable time frame and the capital markets and big pharma are behaving quite rationally.
Despite all the billions poured into cancer research over the last 30 years the advancements seem pretty weak, from my limited understanding. Apparently they use eight years cancer free as the mark to declare you cured. But then people often relapse and drop dead young not so long after that.
At some point it might make sense to admit pouring more money into drug and treatment research is detracting from other pursuits. You could probably make a much bigger dent in cancer by studying preventive nutrition and how to make it widespread.
Cancer has a single name, but it's really a wide range of different issues. Some forms of cancer are eleminated by taking drugs with minimal side effects others will still kill you.
It seems to me that the main problem is CYA. A scientist shouldn't have to worry about maintaining their positions when trying something new or unorthodox.
It seems to mirror what hackers experience when working for large or traditionally-minded companies. The hacker wants to do things unorthodoxically (use a non-Java programming language, a non-Windows OS, a non-Oracle database, less enterprisey software, etc.), but the company resists due to the managers' concerns that approving such "risky" things could harm their employment or advancement.
In the end, both scientists and hackers have to seek alternative methods to pursue what we want. And even though that often can result in what looks like failure, both groups know that's where they trully learn new things and break new ground. And that usually means that the next time around, we're more likely to succeed in ways that advance technology and scientific knowledge.
A great deal of government research funding is of the "full employment act for scientists" variety. Inevitable when accountability for actual real-world results - as opposed to accountability for completing the project you said you were going to complete - goes out the window.
"This might as well be language lifted from a mythical government release on the Full Employment Act for Gerontologists. It's all so grey and tired - rescue the scientists, pay the scientists, help the scientists. Note the utter absence of any sort of discussion of goals or results. What are these scientists actually doing? What is the value of it? Where are they going? When will they get there? What does it mean to me?
"This sort of thing is exactly why there is little public support for or understanding of mainstream aging research. I've long said that basic research is no different from any other human endeavor. It isn't magic, immune to planning - you can set goals, plans and schedules. You can invest in research in exactly the same way as commercial companies invest in research day in and day out. Those who claim that you can't set goals, timelines, explain matters to the public, create excitement and make real fireworks fly in an area of fundamental research are generally much more interested in the steady flow of dollars or their own particular hobby than in actually getting something meaningful accomplished."
I'm not sure whether you are in agreement with the article or just commenting on the issue of government research. The article seems to say that a lot of grants are rejected because the projects aren't safe bets. In a way, they're rejected because they can't guarantee real-world results. So, according to your comment, isn't the system working?
