reasoning are becoming
Ethics and deductive reasoning are becoming ever more critical in the selection process. Premeds might soon find themselves in a "devil's advocate" type of debate with two interviewers, fully expected to argue for and against both sides of a prevailing issue of today. Perhaps one of the most pressing issues of interest to doctors, medical schools and premed advisers is innovation, or the lack thereof, in the pharmaceutical industry.
Some people believe that the pharmaceutical industry has essentially abandoned the pursuit of novel drugs in lieu of cheap, rip-off clones based upon the intellectual property of other companies. Others believe the pharmaceutical industry brain trust is hard at work sixteen hours per day battling issues far too complex to be understood by ordinary scientists. This recent article, "Pharma's Fake Innovation Crisis," is an excellent example of the dichotomy that fuels the debate continuing now for more than a decade.
Who's right and who's wrong?
Joel Lexchin and Professor Donald Light contend that "slowed innovation and stagnant drug discovery" due to biological complexity is a ploy by pharmaceutical industry executives, Congress and the media to generate higher and higher levels of revenue for pharmaceutical R&D funding. The more funding obtained, the more money for company executives and the shareholders.
Organic Chemist Dr. Derek Lowe, on the other hand, argues these are nothing but lies spun to take "pot shots" at the pharmaceutical industry and the genius scientists hard at work in the brain trusts. He argues that the complexity of biology in certain therapeutic indications severely impairs progress at a rate we might find desirable, and hence the lack of innovation in drug design is more a consequence of the continued learning curve endemic to the ever expanding area of molecular biology.
