I’m intrigued, do you have a link?
I’m intrigued, do you have a link?
I’m a researcher in the biological sciences at an institute which receives lots of government funding, and was at a university before my current position. We are not being paid to develop drugs. We are being paid to develop new knowledge that hopefully can be useful (in the broad sense of the term). Practically no one I’ve ever met during my time in academia is developing drugs, and the small few that were doing so were only researching a single, small part of a very long, complex process.
The R&D you are paying for is for us to typically find out that “Protein X interacts with Protein Y and causes Effect Z. When we delete Protein X then Effect Z goes away”. We might also find out that “Molecule Q can block the activity of Protein X, but has a host of issues that make it ineffective when given to Petri dish cells and mice.” This can give you a lead towards making a drug, but what we do is basically discover a possible starting point, nothing more. If someone wants to make a drug from this, they typically will start a company and get venture capital and angel investor money, as university labs are usually poorly equipped financially and talent wise to actually develop a drug (to speak nothing of pushing it through clinical trials). Transforming Molecule Q into a bona fide drug candidate is going to require a massive amount of work that most lay individuals are completely unaware of.
I’m really curious where this concept that the government is spending tons of money on drug R&D at publicly funded universities is coming from. It sounds great as a talking point, but from my perspective within the system it’s not quite how things work.
Fortunately Microsoft Office isn’t fully subscription yet, but with how much they’re pushing Office365 it’s not too surprising that people don’t seem to realize this. You can still buy a permanent license from MS directly (with some digging around to get to the correct page) or from 3rd party websites. Only downside is it locks you into the current version of Office, but for the average user (me) that’s not too much of a big deal - I can’t recall them releasing any major must have features over the past 10 years.
Sucrose has a solubility of about 200 g/100 mL water. I’m in American so I’ve never seen Australian food labels, but would they really label a sugar-saturated drink as having 200% sugar? I guess technically you can do that, but it seems a bit weird. In my experience % is usually reserved for liquid in liquid solutions, like alcoholic beverages.
I feel like this is a situation where going full Karen would be an acceptable response.