Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17294

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Iheanacho I
Review of the Week: When truth lies buried
BMJ 2010 Feb 3;
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/340/feb03_1/c604

Abstract:

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. The original version of this maxim (“A million here, a million there . . .”), usually cited as the words of the late US senator Everett Dirksen in the 1960s, remains a beautifully sarcastic condemnation of careless spending. But obviously it’s also out of date, partly owing to the ravages of inflation. Today even a billion of any currency barely has the power to shock or awe, albeit that (or perhaps because) these sums are way outside the experience or understanding of most people.

So the received wisdom that it now takes more than a billion dollars to develop a new drug might provoke yawns not gasps, particularly in a macroeconomic climate where finance ministers wouldn’t get out of bed to borrow any less. In truth, of course, this amount is huge in anybody’s language. And it . . .