Odd stories of large, hairy creatures

Oh, The Australian has a column about something other than Bill Leak (martyr), Gillian Triggs (evil witch), and the Racial Discrimation Act (work of the devil).

Caroline Overington (no link, 'cos of paywall, but I got to it by Googling "A Yowie Encounter" in news)  writes of an autobiographical book to be published by a somewhat eccentric character she met at a writer's festival a few years ago, and it contains a yowie story: 

It’s hard to tell from Scoundrel Days exactly how old Brentley was when he saw his Yowie but it’s the 1980s, so he’s definitely still a boy, and he’s travelling with the cultish parents in the far north with an Aboriginal kid called Albatross, or Trossy.

Trossy’s dad goes into the bush to find a kangaroo, and Brentley and Trossy busy themselves by diving deep in a lagoon, stirring up turtles from under floating logs, trying to touch the bottom.

Then Trossy comes up, and he “thrashes about, near drowning himself”.

Brentley yells: “What?”

Trossy screams: “Yowie.”

Brentley looks up, and behind him “towers a ferociously ugly creature, covered in thick orange hair …. Clumps of mud, broken sticks and gore hang off it like dags on a sheep. It has dull grey eyes, a flat pushed-up nose, and teeth like an English bulldog’s. It snorts and then roars ... I vomit in its face from the stench and the terror and run like a sinner to heaven.”

Some time later, Trossy’s dad reappears with the kangaroo over his shoulders or by the tail. Who can even remember? Brentley tells him about the Yowie, and he comes over all thoughtful, saying the Yowie won’t normally reveal itself to white folk, but perhaps somebody important died. I’ll leave that there.

 The veracity of the author as to stories he tells is somewhat undercut, however, with Overington's very next line:

The book goes on with Brentley’s memories of being born during a cyclone, with blue tarps flapping in the ferocious wind where the hospital roof should have been. 

Sounds to me he might have more than a touch of the Shirley MacLaine's about him.

Anyhow, Googling yowies in news leads to a recent story from Toowoomba by a woman apparently (because it is second hand) claiming to have encountered one while bushwalking close to the town:

The witness was bushwalking when she noticed the frightening creature and said it was about two metres tall.
The creature was originally walking through the grass when she first saw it but then sat down in the grass and completely ignored the woman's attempts to gain its attention.
"It has a head like a gorilla and long arms. I couldn't see it from the waist down because it was walking through long grass with its arm swinging from side to side," she said.
"I was only about 20 ft away and I could see it was very muscular. It was very broad.
"I was trying to figure out what I was looking at. I thought it might have been a rock but no way, it had shoulders and a head. Nothing else is shaped like that."

Very odd comment at the end, about trying to work out if she was looking at a rock, or not.   Does she wear glasses, I wonder?  On the other hand, if the paranormal explanation of hairy men being creatures who slip over from their other dimensional version of Earth into ours occasionally, perhaps they don't see humans well when they are in our world?  

I have to say, I find this second hand story of an encounter from a few years back  (again, in South East Queensland) somewhat more convincing, or at least, confusing:

"My friend is a photographer and they were out doing night time shooting.
"It was along the Fig Tree walk, just opposite the Charlie Moreland campground.
"They were walking through the bush at night time by torch light and they were heading down towards the creek and they got a really strange strong smell and they both commented and said, 'yuk, isn't' that a horrible smell. What a disgusting smell'.
"They went a little bit further and heard a crunching noise through the bush ahead of them, and then they saw it, with two big red eyes staring back at them.
"Not too close, just a little bit away from them.
"Whatever it was, they said it was quite tall, and it kept going and then every now and then it would turn around and look back at them.
"They shone their torches on it and they couldn't really make out what it was, but all they could clearly see were these red eyes.

As I wrote here 11 years ago, I find the association of foul smells with a sighting/sound of a large creature in the Australian scrub the most fascinating thing - both because I once knew a guy who said he had the exact same experience while bush camping not too far from Brisbane, and because, unlike other countries, we simply have no wild animal known for its terrible smell.  Sure, the red eyes might be from an owl, or something else, but I just don't know how to account for the smell.

Anyway, moving onto other recent-ish newspaper reports from near my part of the world, while the main character in this story tells of a highly, highly improbable encounter...

Mr Duffy says he was camped in the bush, north-east of Gympie late one night, when "a very large male approached me".

"I got a fright and so did he," he said.

The creature seemed human but larger and spoke in a language he thinks might be Latin.

"He was quickly able to learn a few words in English and we spoke for about two hours," the Kybong resident said.

"They're very intelligent."

But he says they are in danger.

"They build meagre shelters in the forest which are often destroyed by humans," he said.

"The EPA won't respond to my calls."

...in the same report, it starts with brief details of ex Senator Bill O'Chee claiming he and a group of students saw something odd in the Gold Coast hinterland:

Former Queensland senator Bill O'Chee was one of more than a dozen people, including fellow high school students and teachers, who claimed to have seen such a creature at a Springbrook camp site in 1977.

It was, Mr O'Chee said "an immensely powerful creature" and he later told a documentary interviewer: "Basically we saw a yowie, but we didn't know what they were at the time.

"We saw a sort of hairy, ape-like thing that probably would have stood about eight feet tall," he said.

If you want to read about other oddball, action man, yowie-evidence hunters, have a look at this report.  Yes, one guy claims to have been attacked, twice.

And then, in another bit of whiplash, I have mentioned how my family likes going to the monthly farmers market at Mulgowie - barely a town, more of a locality, really, but it does have a pub and a sports ground.   Anyway, I don't think I have mentioned before that it had its own yowie sighting in 2001, which, for some reason, got a detailed re-telling in the local press in 2013:

The elusive creature has not been officially seen since August 15, 2001, when Mrs Crouten, a cook working for a local doctor, saw the yowie-like animal at midnight on the corner of McGarrigal Rd and Mulgowie Rd.

The QT reported the incident and interviewed Senior Constable Johns, who said the lady "saw something that looked like an ape approaching the road" as she was driving along.

It was walking on all fours.

Snr Constable Johns says the lady was lucid and sane, so he accompanied her to the site to search for the beast after she reported it.

The report ties in with what Mrs Crouten told the Australian Yowie Research organisation.

The group's website records her as saying the creature was "covered in dark hair" and "looked like a large version of an orang-utan".

 Creature on all fours?  Given there are lots of cows and horses in the area, that's not a good sign.
 The local publican offers an odd explanation:

 Meanwhile, Vidler has a hunch the yowie was "a big black dog that lived in the area that had a funny arse on it".

The local community is happy to be known for the sighting:

"I believe there were two or three people that saw the yowie," he says.

"Its notoriety has died down a bit, but it still comes up.

"It was our mascot for our Mulgowie Yowies indoor cricket side and a couple of touch football teams have been the Yowies.

"My grandmother made a logo up when we were looking at having the yowie as our mascot at the cricket club. She sketched up a half human, half gorilla with a cricket bat.

Much further away, and in 2014, a man in Far North Queensland sees something on the road that does sound rather ape like:

But Wonga Beach man Brad Brown is still shaken after his encounter last week with something resembling an ape.
“I was driving home from work about 10.30pm and I was on the Rocky Point range going around a bend when suddenly something ran in front of my car,” he said.
“I didn’t know what I saw, it was big and really hairy with an oblong-shaped head.
“Its arms were hanging behind it as it ran.”

And I'll end on this story, from a character in 2010 who got scared by something large he could barely see near him in the bush, and while it's obviously inconclusive, I was sort of impressed by the self deprecation and what comes across as genuine puzzlement.   (There was no smell, though, which would have made the story perfect!)

Quite a talent

I haven't seen Mark Humphries doing his Andrew Bolt impersonation before (as conservative talk show host Campbell Parkes) but it's pretty good:



Humphries is quite a talent, I think, although I don't know how much of his material that turns up on The Feed is written with others.   Here's a link with lots of his videos.

Moderate drinking gets a boost

Maybe I should ramp up the alcohol in my formula for a healthy life:   an average one alcoholic drink a day, not every second day.  But I don't think it would hurt to do what most people probably do - a few drinks on a Friday or Saturday night, and then skip any drink on a couple of mid week nights. 

Anti aging treatments in the news

First - some promising sounding research in the US and Australia.  (Mind you, many promises in this field seem to amount to nothing.):

And the BBC has a report on a drug which does well in mice, at least.

Maybe Peter Thiel can stop being a wannabe vampire...

They don't get out much

To outsiders, the American health and leave system has always looked like a complete mess. 

Yet, even with the controversy swirling around health care reform, this article notes that Pew survey results indicate Americans are not as concerned about their own mess as you would expect:

“In general, the public has a more positive view of policies that incentivize employers or employees rather than those that create a new government fund to finance and administer the benefit,” the Pew researchers write.

This mirrors an interesting quirk in health care: People seem to trust their own employers more than the federal government to handle their health benefits and insurance, even though people end up more satisfied when the government provides it.

In some ways, this is just a side effect of Americans’ eroding trust in government, which is near all-time lows. Just one in five Americans trust the government “always or most of the time,” according to a 2015 Pew poll. Meanwhile, American trust in businesses is considerably stronger. Not only does “big business” outperform Congress on measures of public confidence, “small business” is the one of the most trusted “institutions” in the U.S., according to Gallup—second only to the military. That faith is revealed in this current Pew survey on paid leave, in which two-thirds of workers said they “believe their employer cares a great deal or a fair amount about the personal well-being of their employees.”

I think the answer lies in two things:   the streak of paranoia that runs through American politics  and which is a never ending source of fascination and concern to foreigners, and the fact that very few  Americans ever get to experience how other nations with greater government involvement in health care work.    (I don't think it a myth that Americans are not big overseas travellers, let alone stay long enough in other countries to ever need their health system.)

Danger in London

OK, this is a dangerous comment to make, in case there is a major Islamic inspired attack in England again in the near future.   And there is a bit of a difference as to the current situation, in that the previous decades of terrorist attacks at least were carried out by people with a clear, more-or-less achievable political end in view.  (Whereas now, Islamic inspired nutters are completely deluded in thinking that their attacks are going to actually achieve anything of benefit for their fantasy Caliphate, or help in the Middle East in any way.)

But - I thought it still worth noting that go back a few decades, and London really had a dangerous reputation for terrorist attacks that (to my mind) made it feel riskier than it does now, despite yesterday's horrible attack.

What I'm referring to, of course, is the lengthy terrorist campaign in London and elsewhere in England run by the IRA.

I mean, just look at the extraordinary length of the list of terrorist attacks and incidents from the 70's to the 90's compiled at this Wikipedia post.   While my memory was that London was in the news a lot in those decades for all the wrong reasons, the number of incidents is worse than I would have estimated.

So, yeah, random Islamic inspired attacks are terrible, but London and England will come through it.

Straight talking from John Quiggin

John Quiggin resigned from the Climate Change Authority with this bit of straight talking:

The government’s refusal to accept the advice of its own Authority, despite wide support for that advice from business, environmental groups and the community as a whole, reflects the comprehensive failure of its policies on energy and the environment. These failures can be traced, in large measure, to the fact that the government is beholden to rightwing anti-science activists in its own ranks and in the media. Rather than resist these extremists, the Turnbull government has chosen to treat the vital issues of climate change and energy security as an opportunity for political pointscoring and culture war rhetoric.

I do not believe there is anything useful to be gained by providing objective advice based on science and economic analysis to a government dominated by elements hostile to both science and economics.

As I've said before, there needs to a formal split between the climate change deniers in the Coalition, and the sensible.  I can't see how Turnbull can really keep pandering to the foolish within his government.

Yes, it is sinister

From The Guardian:

Donald Trump wants us to associate immigrants with criminality. That is the reason behind a weekly published list of immigrant crimes – the first of which was made public on Monday. Singling out the crimes of undocumented immigrants has one objective: to make people view them as deviant, dangerous and fundamentally undesirable.

The very idea is sinister.

Since the start of his presidential campaign, Trump characterized brown-skinned immigrants as criminals by painting Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as terrorists. This fear-mongering has continued into his administration, and has expressed itself in unprecedented policies.

Trump has gone so far as to create an office called Voice – Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement Office. An expert on concentration camps has already pointed out that the weekly list of crimes bears deeply troubling resemblances to Nazi–era Germany, where Hitler published Jewish crimes...

Reading the report, one is struck by how the alarmist rhetoric of Trump and the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t quite fit the nature of many of the crimes that are listed. A high number of them are for non-violent offences such as drug possession, driving under the influence of liquor and traffic violations. 

No other Republican candidate was so brazen as to actually encourage xenophobia for political advantage, and it was pretty outrageous that they, and the media, didn't attack it more during the campaign.  (Or now.)

Stupidity runs in the family

Donald Trump Jr called 'a disgrace' for tweet goading London mayor 
The whole misleading tweet comes from The Independent running a somewhat misleading headline in 2016.   But it would seem someone in the Trumpworld dug this up and Donald Jnr ran with it.
Dumb, but lots of dimwitted Trump supporters will never bother going further than the tweet.

Update:  I see from Catallaxy (where CL is running with the story - of course, selective quoting and exaggeration is his rhetorical speciality) that the source of this is from Gateway Pundit.  

And in checking on what exactly Khan said in September 2016, it is clear that many English papers ran with "part and parcel" but without putting up the full sentence.   Even when you go to the Breitbart version of the story, they don't seem to have the full sentence, and their longest quote goes with the unremarkable:

“It is a reality I’m afraid that London, New York, other major cities around the world have got to be prepared for these sorts of things,” he said, the Evening Standard reports.
“That means being vigilant, having a police force that is in touch with communities, it means the security services being ready, but also it means exchanging ideas and best practice,” he added.

Ocean acidification continues apace, with hardly anyone noticing

From Nature Climate Change:

The uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ by the ocean decreases seawater pH and carbonate mineral aragonite saturation state (Ω_arag), a process known as Ocean Acidification (OA). This can be detrimental to marine organisms and ecosystems^{1, 2}. The Arctic Ocean is particularly sensitive to climate change³ and aragonite is expected to become undersaturated (Ω_arag < 1) there sooner than in other oceans⁴. However, the extent and expansion rate of OA in this region are still unknown. Here we show that, between the 1990s and 2010, low Ω_arag waters have expanded northwards at least 5°, to 85° N, and deepened 100 m, to 250 m depth. Data from trans-western Arctic Ocean cruises show that Ω_arag < 1 water has increased in the upper 250 m from 5% to 31% of the total area north of 70° N. Tracer data and model simulations suggest that increased Pacific Winter Water transport, driven by an anomalous circulation pattern and sea-ice retreat, is primarily responsible for the expansion, although local carbon recycling and anthropogenic CO₂ uptake have also contributed. These results indicate more rapid acidification is occurring in the Arctic Ocean than the Pacific and Atlantic oceans^{5, 6, 7, 8}, with the western Arctic Ocean the first open-ocean region with large-scale expansion of ‘acidified’ water directly observed in the upper water column.

Do us a favour and kick him in the shins?

Someone who worked for years in the Climate Policy area of the IPA does not deserve a friendly welcome from anyone connected with the CSIRO.  (The IPA thinks it should be privatised, by the way.)

And he is short, isn't he?  (He wishes he wasn't, so feel free to mention it anytime...)

Different stars, even..

OK, so of course I knew the first bit, and have told my children about it (although I'm not entirely sure they remember), but I didn't know the second part (about the different stars):

A theoretical physicist, Krauss proclaimed in a recent talk: "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded, and the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust."

Wall Street Journal joins the "fake news" outlets

Even the WSJ is sick of Trump's "say anything" approach to the truth.

Their editorial starts with:

If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.

and ends on this note:

Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.

Good to see.

Let him rest

I take it from my twitter feed that there are perhaps two articles with respect to the late Bill Leak in The Australian today?  One of them is by his son, defending his father against the charge of racism, and I suppose I don't begrudge him having an opportunity to address that.  But still - the column space that has been devoted to him by that paper is just completely over the top.   (And I still say that a non-racist can produce a cartoon that racists take support from - and editors and the cartoonist himself should be sensitive to that.)

The Australian has a tiny circulation and seems to be under the impression that its relentless campaigns are actually of vital interest to the population at large.  In fact, they only matter to their hard core Right readership, including a limited number of Coalition politicians.  

And really, if the Senate is not going to pass amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act, what is the value of Coalition spending so much time on this, apart from it representing Right wing virtue signalling?  

Hayek and morals

I really have little interest in Hayek - my assumption is that he is too much of a cult figure to be all that worthwhile studying.  (Cult figures are rarely worth the effort - it's a safe rule of thumb.  And no Jesus Christ jibes from you, thank you Jason.)

But I see there's an article that covers his attitude to morals, and it would appear that he was a proto Ayn Rand (maybe everyone already knows that, except me?):

To be sure, Hayek endorsed a wide range of laws that sustain public order, private property, honesty in business activities, making contracts and determining prices. No doubt, everyone would seem to benefit by adopting such standards, but they are minimal and beg for a more comprehensive approach. Instead, Hayek suggests that in the modern era a number of formerly esteemed virtues need to be abandoned. It seems that a Christian based moral outlook harbors several moral ‘instincts’ that are outmoded. Among those ‘instincts’ are solidarism (a concern for the overall welfare of a community) and altruism (a charitable and self-sacrificing attitude toward one’s neighbors). Writing in The Fatal Conceit, Hayek says, “It is these two instincts, deeply embedded in our purely instinctive or intuitive reactions, which remained the great obstacle to the development of the present market economy.” He contends that free trade and modern Capitalism emerged in the 18^th century only after such virtues were superseded by self-interest. This explains, he says, why Capitalism is maligned by ill-informed people who wrongly insist that it’s vital for a well governed society to actively promote policies that insure fairness, equity, and social justice.

Most traditional thinkers are convinced that such moral virtues underlie the concept of a moral order and of the common good. Solidarism and altruism, both forms of charity, are often rendered by the Greek word ‘agape.’ The two virtues are central to the Gospels, the Ten Commandments and have always been a core component of a Judeo-Christian culture. Nonetheless, true liberty for Hayek requires replacing them with self-interest and individualism.  ...

In public policy, Hayek did favor retaining long established institutions and was a persuasive advocate for private initiatives. Aside from minimal help for the destitute, Hayek repeatedly warned that all public assistance, welfare or social insurance provided by the state had to be quickly and efficiently phased out. Such endeavors, he wrote, not only destroy liberty by imposing a particular moral viewpoint on everyone, they will shepherd us to national bankruptcy! This austere philosophy has attracted many sponsors.

Yeah, nah.   This is where  I'll take Catholic social teaching on economics and government, with its balance between the extremes of free market economics and excessive  government control, any day. 

Empathy in the news

There's a book out with the somewhat provocative title Against Empathy, and the author explains it at Vox, and lots of sites discuss his argument, such as at Psychology Today.

In a similar vein, you can read how Too Much Emotional Intelligence is a Bad Thing.

I should drink more

Tea, that is.

My hunch from articles that continually flow about the health benefits of certain drinks is that the healthy lifestyle might involve:   one strong cup of coffee per day; one cup of tea per day; one glass of red wine every second day.  And then I can stand on one of those silly looking vibrating boards instead of exercising, because, surprisingly, they might actually be good for you too.

In other movie news

Who can believe the US (and international) box office for Beauty and the Beast?  

Just goes to show, too, that the publicity about a gay "moment" in the film has caused no significant conservative backlash, at all.   (Anyway, I see that the "moment" is exceeding brief.)

Excuse me while I have a fanboy moment

Good to hear, but maybe this one shouldn't be at the start of the film:

....it sounds like Mission: Impossible 6 is going to have a stunt so insane that Cruise has been training to do it for over a year. That’s according to Collider, which spoke with M:I 6 producer David Ellison about the film.
According to Ellison, this new stunt is going to be “the most impressive and unbelievable thing that Tom Cruise has done in a movie,” and he’s been preparing for it since “right after Rogue Nation came out.” He wouldn’t offer any specifics, but he explained that Cruise prefers doing real stunts like this because “the audience can tell when it’s you on a green screen or when you’re actually doing it live.”

Take that, Thiel

Oh.  Isn't one of Peter Thiel's policy ideas that the drug market should be opened up so that people can try them out before they go through all of the expensive testing?

Well, here's a short argument at Nature that there are good economic (and social) reasons to insist that drug companies show efficacy before they release drugs.  Some extracts:

Knowledge of the history is important. The 1938 US Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act required only that drug safety be demonstrated. In 1962, new legislation demanded that marketed drugs also go through well-controlled studies to test for therapeutic benefit. More than 1,000 medical products were subsequently withdrawn after reviews found little or no evidence of efficacy¹. The free market that existed before 1962 revealed no connection between a drug's ability to turn a profit and its clinical usefulness. The same is likely to be true of any future deregulated market....

An overly stringent system will err by withholding or delaying safe and effective 'good' drugs from patients. Critics of existing regulations often point to the case of a treatment for Hunter syndrome — a rare, inherited degenerative disease in which the absence of a crucial enzyme can be fatal. Trials of the enzyme-replacement drug Elaprase (idursulfase) meant that, for a year, a group of children received a placebo instead of the drug that was eventually shown to be effective².

Conversely, a lax regulatory system will subject patients to 'bad' drugs that may be toxic. The iconic example is the more than 10,000 birth defects caused worldwide by the drug thalidomide, a late 1950s remedy for nausea during pregnancy. Even in the past dozen years, initially promising drugs, such as torcetrapib (for reducing cholesterol and heart-disease risk) and semagacestat (for improving cognition in people with Alzheimer's disease), were found to cause harm only after they had been tested in large, mandatory trials — effects that were not seen in the smaller trials³.

The most extreme proponents of deregulation argue that the market can serve as the sole arbiter of utility: if a medicine is selling well, it must be delivering value⁴. A more moderate view is that reliable information on efficacy can be collected after a drug goes on sale, through uncontrolled observational studies and other post hoc analyses.

There is a third type of error that these arguments neglect (see ‘The good, the bad and the useless’). Untested drugs can be reasonably safe but provide no benefit.

And here's the key point:

Arguments for deregulation fail to recognize that valuable information has a cost. Drug companies cannot afford to generate reliable evidence for efficacy unless their competitors are all held to the same high standards. Efficacy requirements level the playing field and ensure that the health sector receives the data needed to inform good therapeutic and economic decisions. The government, insurers, patients and others need to know whether medicines are likely to provide benefits. Patients and physicians must have access to reliable information to make educated and ethical choices.

Rigorous clinical studies are still the best way to learn whether a drug works, and regulation is essential to ensure that these studies are conducted. Pre-specified endpoints, controls, randomization and blinding cannot be discarded without sacrificing actionable clinical information⁵.

Once a drug is on the market, it is hard to gather solid efficacy data....

The FDA's gatekeeper role makes the medical marketplace function. The economic benefits of good research and a healthier population will be lost without incentives to find truly effective drugs.

Jason - that article is definitely tweet worthy, no?

Update:   I just Googled up an article at Vox from a couple of months ago that explained the pro FDA argument from a medical point of view.   A lot of this read like what John just said in comments:

Thiel, a libertarian iconoclast, has repeatedly made the case that the FDA gets in the way of drug innovation by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to the market. Some of the FDA candidates he’s identified — including Silicon Valley’s Jim O’Neill and Balaji Srinivasan — have similarly argued that the agency should dump its requirement that drugs be proven effective before reaching the market, and that we’d be better off if the FDA operated more like a “Yelp for drugs.” In other words, bringing the same speedy and disruptive approach to medical regulation that Silicon Valley brought to the taxi and hotel industries, for example, will unlock cures — fast. 

But Thiel and his pals miss a very important point about developing new drugs: Manipulating biology isn’t the same as manipulating computer code. It’s much, much harder. Speeding up medical innovation will take a lot more than just stripping down the FDA — it’ll take huge leaps forward in our understanding of biochemistry and the body. Health care is also different from taxis and hotels in another key way: Consumers can’t really judge the safety and quality of medical products by themselves....

...I asked a longtime pharmaceutical scientist (and conservative), Derek Lowe, for his views. In his 28 years in the lab, Lowe has seen hundreds of thousands of compounds tested on a huge variety of drug targets, and never, not once, has he brought a drug to market.

The reason? “We don’t know how to find drugs that work,” he said.

For every 5,000 compounds discovered at this "preclinical" phase of drug development, only about five are promising enough to be tried in humans. That’s a success rate of 0.1 percent.

Drug innovation comes from painstaking tinkering and a dash of luck. “It’s very tempting for someone who has come out of IT to say, ‘DNA is code, and cells are the hardware; go in and debug it’,” Lowe said. “But this is wrong.”

In Silicon Valley, humans have designed the hardware, software, and computer code they’re working with. In medical research, scientists do not have that advantage, Lowe said. “We have 3 billion years of spaghetti-tangled gibberish to deal with. And unless you’ve done [drug development], it’s very hard to get across how hard it is. I don’t know of anything that’s harder.” Biochemistry and cell biology are “like alien nanotechnology,” he added.

So the real hurdle researchers face when it comes to finding new drugs for people isn’t overcoming a stringent regulator; it’s grappling with that “alien nanotechnology” in the lab.

Update 2:  from another article, talking about the effect of having an FDA that insists on showing efficacy as well as safety:

Pharmaceutical executives complain about the drug approval process, but usually don’t want to go anywhere close to a safety-only path. In practice, what they want is for the FDA to return their calls, for bureaucratic delays to be reduced, and to find the fastest and least expensive way to prove safety and efficacy.

Many biotech entrepreneurs are actually fans of a tough FDA. Pharmaceutical billionaire Leonard Schleifer, the founder and chief executive of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, said that he was against “making it really easy to get your drug approved” at the Forbes Healthcare Summit last week, before news of that O’Neill was under consideration leaked.

Schleifer said that he couldn’t compete with companies like Pfizer or Eli Lilly, which have 10 to 100 times as many salespeople as Regeneron. But he can compete to get approved first, or to have a better drug that has more uses that the FDA allows it to advertise based on science.

“Having a high bar is a good thing, in my opinion, because it allows innovators to compete,” Schleifer said.