> I’m fond of saying that the most important single statistic about the drug industry is the clinical failure rate, which is (by any reasonable standard) appallingly high.

He starts off on the wrong note, there is nothing at all wrong with a high rate of clinical failures. If anything, the reasonable argument standard might be that this rate is too low. It implies researchers are trying things that they expect to have a 10% chance of working out. That means we're missing out on all the cures and techniques that have a 1% chance of working out but but nonetheless do work.

Failed attempts cost society nearly nothing and successes will have compounding benifits for, y'know, lets optimistically say the human race survives for centuries. 1% or 0.1% success rates sound completely reasonable with that sort of lopsided risk profile. There isn't much of a reason not to try anything and everything that has the faintest chance of helping and see what happens.

Rather notably, companies are profit-driven, not good-for-society driven. If 99% of your attempts which cost millions to do fail, the company either has to raise the prices of the drug insanely high or not work as a company. In addition, most drugs aren't humanity saving or crucial for humans to live. You could solve all forms of cancer tomorrow, which would be a great thing, but you aren't "saving humanity". You add less than a decade or so, maximum, to the average human lifespan. This isn't critical to humanity's existence, so this "try or die" mentality doesn't work.

If this try or die mentality does work, why don't we try every possible amino acid chain in every configuration possible? It's an infinitesimally small chance but try or die "outweighs". This is evidently absurd.

For a great example of an extreme success rate being a bad thing, look at Japan's legal system. Prosecutors only take cases that they think they will win, and that assumption is now baked into the system, to the point that they are no longer very good at prosecuting, and anyone that is prosecuted is effectively presumed guilty.

> Failed attempts cost society nearly nothing

The world does not have unlimited resources. Money spent on one project is money that can’t be spent on another.

Except that governing bodies approve many of these drugs which, further down the line, consumers may experience high failure rates or even toxicity, which in other industries such results would be considered outright fraud subject to legal action. if sold to consumers.

Failures also have lots of valuable information. There was a recent Complex Systems podcast about efforts to glean pharma trials.

https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/ruxandra-tesl...