Derek Lowe
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Derek Lowe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, we don't. That's 100% accurate. I mean, you look at some of the big advances over the past 20 or 30 years, things like CRISPR to edit genomes or mRNA as a therapeutic avenue. And you think, my God, you know, I remember working when we didn't know anything about this. God knows I remember working when we didn't know about it.
And I think to myself, people 20, 25, 30 years from now will look back at us and they'll say, oh, those poor people. They didn't know about X or Y or Z. No wonder they weren't making progress against this disease. But now my fear is people 20 years from now will look back at us and say, man, I wish we'd been able to learn more, but everything stopped dead. God damn it.
That is exactly what happens. I mean, he has lived his entire life on the applied end of it. And I should talk because that's where I've lived most of mine, too. In industry, we are driving toward the goal of finding a compound to affect this pathway, this protein, this enzyme in this disease. Very applied. But we are standing on the shoulders of a great deal of basic research.
And some of that basic research looked pretty good. weird or obscure or even useless at the start. RNA interference, which is a tremendously useful research tool and is also the basis of marketed drugs, RNA interference started out when people had trouble explaining the colors of petunia flowers.
And I'm sure Elon would have really had a good time making fun of these morons wasting public money trying to figure out why the petunia flowers turned out different than they expected them to. But you never know where this stuff is coming from.
Gila monster saliva. Boy, what a stupid idea. These people are out there taking swabs from lizard mouths and studying that. You can make fun of any of these things. William Proxmire used to be the senator from Wisconsin back in the 60s and 70s. He used to do that all the time.
He had this thing he called the Golden Fleece Award, where he would pick the stupidest sounding research projects and talk about how those idiot eggheads are wasting your money studying, you know, mosquitoes and, you know, whatever, these tiny little fish that no one cares about. It's an anti-intellectual cheap shot.
I mean, if they had stopped that petunia flower experiment, how long would it have taken us to pick up on the mechanisms of RNA interference, et cetera, et cetera? It's really impossible to say. There are a lot of these studies that are never going to turn out to be much good for anything, but we don't know which ones those are.
Exactly. And I mean, at one drug company where I was working, they sent out a directive that we should try to concentrate on the studies that we thought were most likely to work. And we all looked at that and started laughing. I said, well, that is such a hell of an idea. If only. Yeah, if only we thought of that. Why don't you come down and tell me which ones are going to work? I had a fit.
I got up and more or less yelled at someone. from the main management saying, look, I don't care what it says on the org chart. My real bosses are a bunch of cells growing in dishes and a bunch of rats living in little cages, and they cannot be coached for success like your poster says over there. They do whatever they damn well want, and I have to listen to them.
I have a mixture of alarm and hope. The alarm is because, as we've mentioned, nothing like this has ever happened before. We've never had just a frontal sustained assault on the idea of government scientific funding. And that's just terrifying, and I think that's one of the things it's supposed to be.
It is supposed to be terrifying and to leave the people involved confused, demoralized, shocked, upset. Well, it is doing that. But at the same time, there's a lot of pushback happening, both in public, in print, and especially in the courts. There are lawsuits flying so hard it looks like it's snowing, asking for injunctive relief, asking for blocks, for stays, for restraining orders.
And that's what we're going to find out. Will that line of defense hold? I am hopeful that it will. If it doesn't, we're in big, big, big trouble.
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