I had the same experience on fact checking

As have I

I was taught it costs 100million dollars with one in ten chance of success

That's inherently wrong, if only because there's no one who knows the actual statistics. We know that it's possible to develop a drug for less than $20 million, how much pharma actually spends is indeterminate.

> If it's so easy to fix the system, people would have already done it.

This doesn't follow at all. The difficulty of fixing a system is just one possible reason it might remain as it does; regulatory capture is another, as is well-financed lobbying at the legislative level.

Pharmaceutical companies have a very clear financial interest in seeing as broad as possible use of their products, and demonstrably have the lobbying reach to forcefully advance this interest. If reform of medical trial data regulation is not a vote-winning platform (and it's hard to argue that it's uppermost in many voters' minds), then it's perfectly plausible that a broken system would persist despite the availability of easily-implemented solutions.

You are proving my point. There are many difficulties to fixing the system. Broken system persists because 'solutions' cannot be easily/successfully implemented.

I really enjoyed Simonton's work but was quite surprised by the equal-odds rule you mentioned. It doesn't seem to apply to scientists at the highest level e.g. Einstein.

I'm not sure about that. To some degree, you expect that Einstein's fame means that he would get an 'unfair' amount of credit for even his dull papers either because people give them too much credit ("it's Einstein, after all!") or because they get more attention than your ordinary paper which has no fans reading everything that author produces.

But I think Einstein published quite a lot, actually, which would satisfy the equal-odds rule: I recall reading someone mentioning that only one paper of Einstein underwent peer review out of ~100 published, and now that I look, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications... is a very long page.

because most people secretly desire to be rich - that desire is in our cognitive makeup, so is the desire to bash rich people.

this is becoming a cliche!

great article. it's refreshing hearing from someone who feel secure about their life.

Science is not stamp collecting. It's hardly about putting in the hours, and all about originality. Many Nobel Prize winners have hobbies in music or art.

it's all about originality, which she clearly lacked.

poems are extremely expensive in terms of time. only those with the sharpest mind can afford to create them.