The inventor's dilemma

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

New economic research suggests that large companies can hold back inventors, and the overall economy. Today we talk to an inventor who left a big pharmaceutical company to start afresh, leading to some incredible treatments for serious diseases.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.0	In the 1980s, Joshua Bojo was a chemist for the big pharmaceutical company Merck.
0:17.5	Joshua's job was to try to draw out new compounds and figure out if they could be used for
0:23.3	new medicines.
0:24.8	I was making 25 to 50 compounds a year by hand.
0:30.1	One at a time, we were told that it would take about 50,000 compounds before we should
0:34.7	expect to get a drug.
0:36.4	So you do the math.
0:37.4	The average chemist would never make a drug in their entire career.
0:41.8	You can imagine him in a lab hoping to find a treatment one day for, say, HIV or hepatitis
0:48.3	C. And he thought that a computer could help him with his quest.
0:53.0	So he got one.
0:55.0	Now picture this.
0:56.0	It's four decades ago.
0:57.1	The computer is like the size of a fridge.
0:59.4	He's ready to use it.
1:00.6	But there's a problem because he can't even plug it into the wall in a lab because he
1:05.4	needed a special electrical connection.
1:07.9	The people in charge said, we can't do that until we study the implications of this for
1:13.1	all of Merck's labs around the world.
1:15.8	And I just wanted a plug.
1:18.8	And so it took literally three months to get this expensive computer sitting on a box
	...

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