The “active harm by donating” argument is very unconvincing for me. Specifically, the analogy to blood donation does not strike me as adequate. It’s just not true that “the existence of altruistic blood donors means that ruthless capitalists are not going to invest in creating artificial blood” — a quick Google search shows that there have been numerous startups that have sought to do so and are seeking to do so. That very poorly attested $7.6 billion number is huge, especially considering that number is just for US sales! That’s about the value of US sales of Ozempic generated in 2022 — a drug that has resulted in such enormous flows of money to its Danish producers that it’s impacting the country’s monetary policy.
So that analogy really does not hold, and I think it doesn’t hold in the same ways it does not hold for kidney donation — even with altruistic kidney donors, thousands die every year waiting for a kidney, and there is enormous demand for organs in general (again, a casual Google search for “artificial organ market” suggests it’d be in the tens of billions of dollars per year). A single person donating their kidney could save someone’s life; it is very unclear how that marginal donation and life saved sets back artificial organ research.
Interesting that you’re referring here, as a counterfactual, to a drug that was put on hold for a very long time because weight loss was not a large enough market—only managed to be developed with diabetes as the focus target, and got repurposed for weight loss later.
Also, GLP-1 agonists were a thing for cca 16 years, but the tweaks and research necessary to make them suitable enough for mass-market weight loss only came about in the last 6, and the approval process and scaleup of production took a long time.
Do you believe this would have been faster had weight loss been a 10x bigger market for whatever reasons?
I don’t think so, no, in part because I don’t think that there’s a linear relationship between hypothesized market size and the like likelihood of a product being developed. A breast cancer vaccine could be worth like a hundred billion dollars, but of course, there are real scientific obstacles there. Maybe we can get something like a universal breast cancer vaccine some day, but in the mean time, it seems rather absurd to argue that chemotherapy is net harmfulbecause it suppresses the need for vaccine development.
Weight loss represents an enormous industry in the US. This has been true for decades. (Not devoting a lot of time to research, I found this figure cited in an FTC report based on research by the Atlanta Business Chronicle: ” consumers spent an estimated $34.7 billion in 2000 on weight-loss products and programs.”) But development of obesity drugs has been extremely difficult — historically, “a bottomless pit into which people shove money and time,” according to one journalist. In other words, there’s far more than market size at play.
That a relatively small number of kidney donors somehow suppress (tens of?) billions of dollars worth of value does not seem plausible to me, and moreover, I still don’t think that extra hypothetical market size is likely to substantially influence whether artificial organ transplants are developed faster.
The “active harm by donating” argument is very unconvincing for me. Specifically, the analogy to blood donation does not strike me as adequate. It’s just not true that “the existence of altruistic blood donors means that ruthless capitalists are not going to invest in creating artificial blood” — a quick Google search shows that there have been numerous startups that have sought to do so and are seeking to do so. That very poorly attested $7.6 billion number is huge, especially considering that number is just for US sales! That’s about the value of US sales of Ozempic generated in 2022 — a drug that has resulted in such enormous flows of money to its Danish producers that it’s impacting the country’s monetary policy.
So that analogy really does not hold, and I think it doesn’t hold in the same ways it does not hold for kidney donation — even with altruistic kidney donors, thousands die every year waiting for a kidney, and there is enormous demand for organs in general (again, a casual Google search for “artificial organ market” suggests it’d be in the tens of billions of dollars per year). A single person donating their kidney could save someone’s life; it is very unclear how that marginal donation and life saved sets back artificial organ research.
Interesting that you’re referring here, as a counterfactual, to a drug that was put on hold for a very long time because weight loss was not a large enough market—only managed to be developed with diabetes as the focus target, and got repurposed for weight loss later.
Also, GLP-1 agonists were a thing for cca 16 years, but the tweaks and research necessary to make them suitable enough for mass-market weight loss only came about in the last 6, and the approval process and scaleup of production took a long time.
Do you believe this would have been faster had weight loss been a 10x bigger market for whatever reasons?
I don’t think so, no, in part because I don’t think that there’s a linear relationship between hypothesized market size and the like likelihood of a product being developed. A breast cancer vaccine could be worth like a hundred billion dollars, but of course, there are real scientific obstacles there. Maybe we can get something like a universal breast cancer vaccine some day, but in the mean time, it seems rather absurd to argue that chemotherapy is net harmful because it suppresses the need for vaccine development.
Weight loss represents an enormous industry in the US. This has been true for decades. (Not devoting a lot of time to research, I found this figure cited in an FTC report based on research by the Atlanta Business Chronicle: ” consumers spent an estimated $34.7 billion in 2000 on weight-loss products and programs.”) But development of obesity drugs has been extremely difficult — historically, “a bottomless pit into which people shove money and time,” according to one journalist. In other words, there’s far more than market size at play.
That a relatively small number of kidney donors somehow suppress (tens of?) billions of dollars worth of value does not seem plausible to me, and moreover, I still don’t think that extra hypothetical market size is likely to substantially influence whether artificial organ transplants are developed faster.