Surely, if you're a corpse, you've already lost.I challenge you to a duel!
On the subject of directed funding of cancer research damaging that research, it can also damage the testing that follows. My ex is a geneticist and her organisation tests cancer drugs before they get submitted to human and animal testing. A year or so ago a drug came through that had measurable benefits. It got tested and the results were published giving a strong indication that the testing would pass. Part of her job is to examine the theory as well as the immediately measurable resuls and when she did this she identified that the aproach they were using would have diminishing benefits over time had serious long term implications that could actually lead to the patient being far more susceptible to cancers in the future. In essence, what the drug company had produced was designed to get through initial testing and get to market but wouldn't actually have any real benefit in the long term and would actually be damaging (she did explain the scence to me but it was way above my head). She came under huge pressure from her boss not to publish her concerns because they knew that the drug company would simply so elsewhere for their testing and they represented a major source of funding for her organisation. She was being asked to put human lives at risk for the sake of a bottom line. I'm proud to say she went ahead and published anyway.
The problem is that the testing is carried out by a private company. They recieve public funding but that funding is dependent on the number of clients that source them as a service. In effect making that funding part of the package that the drug company offer them. The leverage is therefore in the drug companies interest rather than the public's. I'd have thought that, while there may be an argument for keeping research in the private sector, testing should be entirely public.
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