Who here thinks drug companies (pharmaceuticals) are altruistic...

[NNadir]

17. I have worked with the pharmaceutical industry for more than 3 decades.

Your doubts about my integrity come from where exactly?

Let me give you a partial list the number of people who go into making a drug, the overwhelming number of which fail in clinical trials:

Synthetic chemists, ethnobotanists, toxicologists, analytical chemists, bioanalytical chemists, prep chemists, veterinarians, ethicists, physiologists, virologists, molecular modelers, chemical engineers, process chemists, biomedical engineers, formulators, regulatory affairs staff, and of course the physicians and nurses overseeing the clinical trials, not only in the inventor companies, but in all the support countries, internationally.

I'm sure I left some classes of people people out.

Almost all of these people worked their asses off in college, suffered through graduate school, many did post docs, and many spent hours traveling, reading, struggling.

Let me tell you a story from my life: We made three metric tons of a key intermediate for one of the first AIDS drugs, and there was an impurity out of specification - slightly out of specification. The pharmaceutical company had to decide whether to take that intermediate, run in through the process, and see if the impurity would concentrate in subsequent steps. If the intermediate were not delivered people would die from lack of the drug. Die. Get it? Die? People in four countries discussed all of the options on the phone. While chemists in my company worked to attempt to isolate the impurity and characterize it, working late into the night, the pharmaceutical company, at their risk decided to ask us to ship the intermediate across the Atlantic, while regulatory experts decided on how to address the problem without compromising quality. If the lot had failed, not only would people die, but the pharmaceutical company would lose millions of dollars. Their chemists stayed up night working with samples shipped overnight to do use tests to show that at least on lab scale, the impurity would not carry through the synthesis.

All of us struggled with a huge ethical conundrum...many of us lost sleep.

As it worked out, the risk accepted by the pharmaceutical company did not compromise the product and lives were saved.

The people who do these things are pharmaceutical companies.

Many have worked for years only to have their projects fail, often at enormous expense. Many work well into the night, and sometimes through the night, because people are dying. That, I'm sure, is happening right now, involving tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of highly trained scientists, all of whom risk failure, or risk being "scooped" by a better product than the one they bring to market.

It's pretty funny how people hate scientists who work on life saving medications until they have an incurable disease, whereupon they seem to expect that people who put in all this challenging - and even sometimes dangerous - work like hell, but are not allowed to have the temerity to like to get paid and maybe appreciated, just a little bit.

All this is happening now, in the days of Covid. If you think all the people working on this are doing so because of the dollar signs in their eyes, well, it says more about you than it does about the people doing the work. There is a very materialistic set of people who seem to think that the only reason anyone does anything is about money.

I go to work every day - because human lives are involved in what I do - and, as a high risk individual, thinking I might die from exposure.

How was your day?

Filled with the pleasure of talking down to your moral inferiors I'm sure.