[ExI] glutamine and life-extension

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 17 February 2010 12:13, Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 17 February 2010 02:03, Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> So who is motivated to research therapeutic effects of cheap
>>> supplements? Drug companies are motivated by the profit potential of a
>>> new, exclusive drug. There are no big payoffs in researching cheap
>>> supplements.
>>
>> Medical researchers, usually publicly or not-for-profit funded.
>
> That was sort of a rhetorical question, but since you answered it, I
> have to point out that there are multiple orders of magnitude of
> difference in funding between public/non-profit and for-profit. The
> drug companies are frantically inventing new stuff, spending billions
> on R&D. Compare that to what's spent on supplement research.
>
> I think it's highly likely that there are effective therapeutic uses
> of supplements that aren't being investigated due to lack of funding.

I can't easily find actual figures but I think in the world as a whole
most medical research is publicly funded. The purpose of publicly
funded research is to discover things that are interesting or useful,
which is not always the same as discovering things that can be sold
for a lot of money. Drug companies generally won't spend money
researching dietary supplements or doing basic research because they
have nothing to gain from it, even though society does. If public
researchers do not think it is worthwhile investigating something then
it is probably because they think it is unlikely it will yield useful
results.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou