When healing a customer means losing your revenue

"Twelve years ago, Irving Weissman discovered a treatment that might have saved the lives of thousands of women with advanced breast cancer, but pharmaceutical companies weren’t interested in developing the therapy. Though that interest is finally being reignited, Weissman doesn’t pull any punches. “I hate to say I told you so,” he said.

Weissman, a professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University, spoke Wednesday and Thursday as part of the Columbia University Department of Religion’s Bampton Lecture series. The lecture series is modeled after a centuries-old Oxford series of the same name, and invites famous authorities in their respective fields to give talks on various issues of interest to the religious community.

In Wednesday’s lecture, Weissman laid out the conceptual foundation of his work—that stem cells are rare, self-renewing, and can regenerate body tissues. Weissman repeatedly expressed frustration that while many of his discoveries seemed to hold remarkable potential for life-saving treatments, commercial or regulatory hurdles have prevented his scientific research from benefiting human beings."

As hard as it can look, those things happen and not just in the medical field.
In this particular field they look more hideous because a person’s life is involved.
But we must remember that businesses are created actually to make money and what is the best way to have a good revenue than having a customer for life?
Somebody who needs your drug (insulin) daily, may be twice a day?

But I am always on the opinion that a healthy person is a better customer indeed.
If he lives longer he will need something else when he will be eighty or so.
he certainly will need something for his stomach, his heart, his muscles, his bones.
How much money can an old person spend in drugs?
I am a pharmacist, I know it.
I know that when you are a certain age, the fear of dying makes you caring for just one thing: your health.
And that means BIIIIg revenues for a pharmaceutical company, providing that it does all what it can to bring people to that age, including curing diabetes in the RIGHT and NEWEST way.

We are at the same question: Is it better one egg today or a chicken tomorrow?