Friday, May 25, 2012
Jack Andraka, a 15-year-old kid from Maryland, just won
the world’s largest high-school science competition by creating a new test for
pancreatic cancer, one of the nastiest and most lethal forms of the disease.
According to various news reports, the winning submission
at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is “28 times cheaper”
than existing tests and far, far more accurate. Andraka received $75,000 for
his efforts, and he’s applied for a patent as well. That will probably earn him
far more in the years to come.
This comes on the heels of another teen wunderkind. In
December, Angela Zhang, 17, won the Siemens Science Competition for inventing a
new way of finding and attacking cancer cells. Some people think it might
actually lead to a cure for cancer someday.
Zhang and Andraka can probably spend the rest of their
high-school careers playing video games in the basement, given that their
college search is going to be pretty stress-free from here on out.
But that’s the real world for you. Impressive kids — or
grown-ups — invent fantastic things, potentially benefitting millions of
people, if not all of mankind. The inventors are rewarded, consumers benefit,
and the economy grows. Woo-hoo!
Of course, the real world isn’t the world many people
imagine it to be. In the Hollywood version of this tale, Zhang would have
disappeared when rumors of her invention hit the boardrooms and star chambers
of Big Pharma. Bruce Willis would have to come out of retirement as the rogue
agent willing to put his life on the line to keep Andraka safe from the
goon-squad ninjas of Bristol-Myers Squibb or the Wetworks teams from Pfizer.
After all, cures and cheaper tests hurt the bottom line
of those evil corporations, and we all know profit is all they care about. I
mean, haven’t you read or seen The Constant Gardener, the John le Carré book
and movie about evil corporations testing drugs on Africans and offing the
whistle-blowers at every turn?
That’s what corporations do, right? At least that’s what
my kid is taught. In Beethoven, the evil munitions industry shoots Saint
Bernards to test bullets. In The Lorax, businesses hate trees. In The Muppets,
they hate Muppets (and love oil). I think that in nearly every movie involving
cute woodland creatures (Furry Vengeance, Yogi Bear, et al.), businesses are
always the bad guys.
When kids get older, they learn from John Grisham movies
that big businesses kill people in order to get what they want. In Aliens, the
company wants to smuggle space critters that will likely wipe out all humanity,
in the slim hope they’ll eke out a bit more profit. In Avatar, the Halliburton
of the future slaughters intelligent aliens and rapes their planet just to make
a buck.
At Cannes, where anti-capitalist movies are always a hit,
Brad Pitt’s newest venture, Killing Them Softly, is touted as a seething
indictment of the American system. “America isn’t a country — it’s a business”
is apparently the film’s central insight. Set against the backdrop of the 2008
financial crisis, the film was reportedly financed by Megan Ellison, daughter
of billionaire businessman Larry Ellison.
No wonder that when these kids grow up, some of them make
documentaries about how vast conspiracies keep the electric car and, no doubt,
the Everlasting Gobstopper off the market. Even more of them uncritically
accept this stuff. After all, everyone knows big businessmen are evil.
So the ones getting involved in politics, at least
Republican politics, must be the sorts of bad guys we’ve all seen in the
movies.
Warren Buffett and George Soros can’t be greedy; after
all, they’re simply trying to “give something back.”
Now, truth be told, I’m no lover of big corporations, but
not because I think they want to poison their customers or shoot my dog for
target practice. My problem isn’t that they’re too rapaciously capitalistic.
Rather, it’s that they’re too opportunistic, too eager to
abandon the free market and work with the government under the false flag of
the greater good.
In a free market, businesses are in a relentless
competition to improve products and satisfy the needs of the consumer. “A new
test for pancreatic cancer? Great! Let’s be the first to get it to market.”
In the cozy world of government-business collusion, the
state counts on the status quo existing far out into the future, for that’s the
only way to preserve and plan out “the system.”
There’s got to be a good movie plot in there somewhere.
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