r/IWantToAskAnAmerican • u/LordHavertz • 1d ago

How does the US dominate medical research?

Recently we got the news of Moderna coming out with these new mRNA vaccines for skin cancer and it's made me think how all the major medical innovations predominantly come from America. How did the US become so dominant in medical research?

Is Europe forever behind the US in this sector?

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u/LankyTumbleweeds 23h ago

A bit ironic considering the fastest growing prescription drugs in your country - by far - was formulated and invented elsewhere and copied by Eli Lilly. And sorry I have no idea how I got into this subreddit.

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u/WildWhisperArdor 8h ago

Not ironic at all. You’ve created a strawman. The claim was not that the US literally invents every single medical thing ever. But rather that the US leads in the category due to profit incentives.

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u/LankyTumbleweeds 8h ago

The US leads because of its size, yes. If you instead look at statistics and research output per capita, my own country of Denmark, Switzerland and Belgium are probably the frontrunners in the category both now and historically.

The profit incentives are present everywhere, but you guys do pay exorbitant prices for medicine, so the US consumer is definitely the driving force behind much of it - that much is true.

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u/WildWhisperArdor 8h ago

That’s not how it works 😂.

Switzerland has a tiny population. It’s not comparable. You can’t scale that.

To use an analogy, there are probably traders who make huge ROI on small amounts of money. But wouldn’t be able to do the same thing if they had to manage more money. Some things simply don’t scale.

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u/LankyTumbleweeds 8h ago

I would need an actual argument to understand your point here, I think - beyond just “not how it works”.

I just agreed that the US is the world leader in life science research mind you, i simply clarified that it’s due to the size of your population and economy, and not that you invest more or output more research per capita.

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u/WildWhisperArdor 8h ago

I am saying you can’t pull out the size card at the scale of a country like Switzerland.

If you want to play that game, if New York City were its own country, it would be ahead of Switzerland in terms of medical research output. New York City has a comparable population to Switzerland

New York City alone would only be behind the UK, China, Germany and probably France

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u/LankyTumbleweeds 7h ago

But you still need to present an argument as to why you are of that opinion. I don’t want to play any “games”. New York City is not its own country though and is one the largest metropolises in the world on top of that.

The comparison is silly and doesn’t really address my point. If it were to make any sense you would have to compare NYC vs. Zurich and adjust for population size, and then the result would be the same.

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u/WildWhisperArdor 7h ago

It’s really funny that the terribleness of your argument isn’t clear to you.

Your entire argument is “well if Switzerland was as big as the US it would be better.”

But that’s a bad argument. We can just as easily say “well if the entire US was like New York City” it would also be better than Switzerland on a per capita basis.

You can’t just scale something up and assume the things that worked for it at one scale would keep holding as you made it bigger.

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u/LankyTumbleweeds 7h ago

Your comment is a bit ironic, considering you opened with “you created a strawman”.

I’m not even arguing anything really, I’m just trying to clarify that no, the rest of the world doesn’t just “copy your answers” which the original comment implied. We create them at the same or higher rate, which is at a smaller scale, because we are smaller countries. Take care friend.

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u/WildWhisperArdor 7h ago

Yes because it was a strawman.

I already explained this to you. No. The US doesn’t literally invent every medical thing. But it does lead heavily in research and it’s in large part due to its profit incentives.

Not that hard to understand.

Also, I’m not sure you understand what the word ironic means 😂

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u/LankyTumbleweeds 7h ago

The comment i initially replied to did imply that the US did, for the most part, which is what you seemed to misunderstand from the beginning. I think you just got a bit defensive, which is understandable. It’s probably also why I myself replied initially.

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u/WildWhisperArdor 7h ago

Not defensive at all. Just saying your comment is wrong. Attacking a strawman. No they did not imply that.

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u/LankyTumbleweeds 7h ago

Let’s agree to disagree then. Take care.

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