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Medical Research
Who's In Charge Of Finding Cures?
Michael J. Fox 10.25.07, 12:30 PM ET

We're living in incredible times. Scientists at the dawn of the 21st century have access to unprecedented resources for increasing understanding of the basic mechanisms of human life, and for translating that hard-earned understanding into tangible advances in human health. The return on our investment in unraveling the human genome alone promises to usher in a new medical era.

So it stands to reason we'd be making inroads to the hunt for treatments that could make illness and injury a thing of the past.

With disease exacting an unknowable burden of human suffering--not to mention an economic toll estimated in the hundreds of billons worldwide--by rights, there should be a Department of Cures in every government, university and pharmaceutical company in the world. In fact, that's the system most of us believe we have. The prospect of disease is frightening; we take refuge in the idea that an army of problem-solvers is continually tinkering with the puzzle pieces of human biology until they fit together and spell "cure."

Yet anyone who's experienced a diagnosis of disease, or gone through it with a loved one, has found out through difficult experience that it's just not that easy. You can never really get a straight answer to a simple question: Who's in charge of finding cures?

Turns out the biomedical research system, as it exists today, is more like a labyrinth than a channel. You and I, together with other taxpayers, private philanthropists and investors, fund it to the tune of over $100 billion every year. But that stunning amount of money has yet to yield a blueprint for translating the science that expands the base of human knowledge into real advances we would feel in our daily lives. And the more our foundation learns about the scientific enterprise, the more deeply we understand that check-writing alone is never going to get us where we need to go. It's also going to take fixing a system that is fundamentally broken.

Broken how? Everyone can agree on the one long-term goal that matters most: speeding up the delivery of scientific solutions for the diseases that ail us. It's the short-term goals and rewards that don't seem to play well together in the sandbox. A researcher in a university lab needs to focus on the kinds of incremental steps forward that get published in scientific journals, while a decision-maker in an industry setting is on the hunt for a massively profitable blockbuster drug. The philosophical and funding gap between these two short-term goals is a chasm, and so far, it's shown no signs of bridging itself.

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