Human and agricultural work is held back somewhat. Golden rice was actually rather simple but the biologists took 14 years of safety testing before it was deployed. Several million people went blind in the meantime. This was completely avoidable. GMO rice is not going to take over the world and should not require 14 years of “safety testing”. The precautionary principle gives people brain worms. Not the fun genetically modified kind of brainworms either.
Regulation in general holds back a lot of progress in biology. During the pandemic, the FDA suspended the rules and suddenly we had extremely rapid innovation. When they suspended the rules, I thought that was ridiculous. If we know the rules are wrong and broken, then we should get rid of the rules, not have a temporary suspension.
With the excess regulation, you also end up increasing the cost of getting drugs or other things to market and as a result you cut off the lower end of the market. This increases the costs and then investors need to get even higher returns in order to recoup investment.
There is a competitive market for investment yield and regulation sort of shapes the kind of yields that you can get in biotech. As a result, money flowing into biotech innovation is pretty constrained, even if the money is available and people are theoretically interested in funding these kinds of things.
How much is innovation in genetic engineering held back by regulation?
Human and agricultural work is held back somewhat. Golden rice was actually rather simple but the biologists took 14 years of safety testing before it was deployed. Several million people went blind in the meantime. This was completely avoidable. GMO rice is not going to take over the world and should not require 14 years of “safety testing”. The precautionary principle gives people brain worms. Not the fun genetically modified kind of brainworms either.
Regulation in general holds back a lot of progress in biology. During the pandemic, the FDA suspended the rules and suddenly we had extremely rapid innovation. When they suspended the rules, I thought that was ridiculous. If we know the rules are wrong and broken, then we should get rid of the rules, not have a temporary suspension.
With the excess regulation, you also end up increasing the cost of getting drugs or other things to market and as a result you cut off the lower end of the market. This increases the costs and then investors need to get even higher returns in order to recoup investment.
There is a competitive market for investment yield and regulation sort of shapes the kind of yields that you can get in biotech. As a result, money flowing into biotech innovation is pretty constrained, even if the money is available and people are theoretically interested in funding these kinds of things.
https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2019/07/the-federal-death-agency-fda/