This is a great first step. But realistically they can only move so fast with FDA regulation increasing your iteration cycle time on therapies to 10 years. Our biomedical regulatory regime is extremely risk averse.
If we had a regime where anyone could voluntarily place any therapy into their own body, we'd move a lot faster. Yes, a few more people would die in testing. But a lot more lives would be saved by the therapies produced.
Not only would more die in testing, but more would die in everyday use and results would be so mixed you could hardly get any information out of the experiments.
One of my biggest clients is in the medical device industry. From the surface appearance, any company could make a simulacrum of their main products with perhaps 90% cost-cutting... but life-saving devices are not like inferior iPods or graphic designs. It's not just things like a crappy user interface, poorer display quality and periodic crashes interrupting your musical flow you would have to deal with if any New Jack could make medical devices, but infection, worsened health, extraneous visits to doctors, untraceable health conditions, lack of accountability by your doctor and yes, death through everyday use, etc. After hearing conservative cheapskates bitch about wasted expenses of FDA regulation and liberals bitch about "how easy it is to walk around the FDA," I have come to fully doubt both (read: realize how much they're talking out of their ani) and respect the FDA after working in such close vicinity to them.
And anyway, yes anyone can voluntarily place any therapy in your body- you just can't get a corporation to help you with it in the U.S.
The root cause is sociopathic control freaks who think they know best, and want to tell other people what to do. It's the reason why so many victimless crimes are punishable with prison time. You can't dictate morality. Preventing someone from doing whatever they please with their body is what is truly immoral, society just needs to realize that.
> If we had a regime where anyone could voluntarily place any therapy into their own body, we'd move a lot faster. Yes, a few more people would die in testing. But a lot more lives would be saved by the therapies produced.
In the age of patent medicines where you could freely use any kind of "medicine" or treatment this was not true at all. Medicine is not simple to understand or develop and asking the average person to make this evaluation is enabling a system that will take money from people in exchange for making their health worse. The kickstarter model is not appropriate for medicine.
If we had a regime where anyone could voluntarily place any therapy into their own body, we'd move a lot faster. Yes, a few more people would die in testing. But a lot more lives would be saved by the therapies produced.