I am sorry, but with language like that, I have to assume you have a political agenda. i.e. I don't take you seriously.

That's not the worst of it - the claim about human ancestors in Bulgaria 7.2 MYA is incredibly speculative and based on a single study with very sparse evidence that just got published a few weeks ago. There are many alternative hypotheses, but as tends to be the case, the researchers went with the one that's likely to get them the most citations and media coverage. It's a perfect example of academic hand-waving combined with lousy science journalism.

Any time a Slashdot poster predicts that his or her post will be modded down, I automatically discount whatever else they had to say, because it's almost guaranteed that none of it will be especially insightful or original.

And if they have good health insurance, it would probably be a bargain compared to what is already being spent on existing HIV medications.

If I'm thinking of the same thing you are, the reason it is so expensive is that there are so few patients - like a few dozen. (It's not even clear to me why they pursued that in the first place, given that it seems like it would be impossible to even recoup their initial investment, much less make a profit.) There is a much larger pool of HIV patients (supposedly 1.2 million in the US alone), even if you just focus on rich nations, and they could still charge what sounds like an extortionate amount of money for it, because insurance companies and governments would love to not needing to keep paying for expensive HIV drugs every month. And whoever brings it to market could easily give it away to poor nations and still become spectacularly wealthy.

Every time an article about cancer therapies (or pharmaceuticals in general) comes up, someone always makes this claim. Aside from the sheer misanthropy of assuming the worst of everyone involved in drug development, it's spectacularly ignorant of human biology, modern medicine, and the pharmaceutical business. The truth is that most drug candidates end up being colossal wastes of money with nothing to show for it, usually because of poor efficacy in large-scale clinical trials (but occasionally due to unforseen side effects, although these are less of an issue with cancer drugs where the patient will probably die anyway), and it's still very difficult to catch these expensive failures earlier in the process. No sane pharma exec is going to tell researchers "let's drop this one, it works too well" because the reward for a cure will still be vastly higher than the money it costs to bring it to market, and meanwhile they'll probably lose 10x that amount on failures.

The only situation where there's a real financial disincentive to develop a cure is when the compound isn't patentable - however drug companies are very good at finding ways to patent things and at least in the US there is an "orphan drug" program that allows companies to patent drugs that would otherwise be public domain if they invest the work and money to take it through clinical trials. The supposed cures that are being ignored are usually outright quack stuff like Vitamin C or antineoplastons, which are of no interest because no one has convincingly shown they are actually useful.

The drugs that kept them alive were invented in Europe by the European governments because not a single US company would spend a dime on it.

[citation needed]

This is the kind of circular argument that's impossible to refute. "Show me the numbers!" "Here are the numbers!" "No, those don't support my predetermined conclusion, so they must be fake." It's exactly like the Trump administration's attitude towards climate science, to pick one recent example. But whatever, the same strategy worked out so well for the fossil fuel interests that I guess I shouldn't be surprised that other ideologues have latched onto it.

This is common knowledge to anyone who has worked in the field - it's like asking for a citation for the claim that eating too much junk food leads to obesity. But here are two data points:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

So that's less than 20% of approved drugs that are discovered in academia to begin with. Academic labs aren't large-scale operations - a single-investigator R01 grant from the NIH might be $5 million over 5 years, and most investigators won't have more than a handful of these. For the really big superstar labs, let's assume a very generous upper bounds of $10 million per year (not all of which is necessarily from the government). If it's a big multi-investigator project, maybe double that. Except for a handful of big centers (like the NIH itself, or genome sequencing centers), academia just doesn't operate at a large scale - a typical university research department is just an aggregation of many smaller units that are largely autonomous. The hidden advantage to these organizational limitations is that failed projects usually fail before anyone spends too much money on them. So let's hypothesize at the extreme, academics spent no more than $50 million per drug candidate. Compare to the numbers in the Wikipedia article.

Now, you could of course argue that because drug development is informed by the public-domain knowledge generated by taxpayer-funded researchers, drug companies are leaching off the public in that way too. I guess that's technically true (albeit difficult-to-impossible to quantify), but you might as well argue that because the government invented digital computers, companies like IBM and Intel should have been nationalized. (Note that the difference in salary between academia and big pharma is relatively large - to shift more drug development to academia, you'll need to raise salaries, or find a lot of scientists willing to work for academic salary while doing grunt work on massive projects that will mostly likely fail.)

To pick a more specific example, the NIH spends approximately $1.2 billion per year on aging-related research (including but not limited to Alzheimer's):

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nia.nih.gov%2Fabout%2F...

Most of that will be single-investigator grants, and as anyone who has worked in basic research can tell you, the majority of the grants that are funded won't lead to any immediate treatments, although they may provide useful information in the long term. In contrast, here is an estimate of the total cost per Alzheimer's drug being $5.7 billion (including failures, and keep in mind the overwhelming bulk of that is spent by drug companies):

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Falzres.biomedcentral.c...

This isn't to argue that taxpayer funding of basic research isn't valuable - it's absolutely essential IMHO. But most of what it produces isn't going to lead directly to new drugs or treatments.

Obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for a drug company, but I did receive funding from them as a government scientist, and receive a small bonus from IP licensing fees every year. Frankly it was far more trouble than it was worth; drug companies are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, even if you only talk to the scientists.

They do a few clinical trials after the government has done the really expensive stuff (what's called "Basic Research", IIRC).

This is simply wrong. The development process (which includes a lot more than just clinical trials) is far more expensive than the basic research component - and that's without even counting how many projects simply fail without anything to show for it.

Globes are (or were) common when I was in US public school (late 80s-late 90s) but no one ever taught us about the distortions in map projections. I specifically remember because I was (and am) a huge map geek and learned all this myself.

But Zhang wasn't the only person to figure this out - George Church's group reported similar results at the same time. The patent office inexplicably decided not to get Church's testimony on the conflict.

It's also worth noting that Zhang was hardly the only person to be working on this - Church's group published a very similar article in the same issue of Science in 2013, and about a half-dozen groups were reaching similar conclusions at the same time, but they weren't as aggressive about filing patents.

From Wikipedia:

"Since the 1980s, an estimated 200 million Chinese live outside their officially registered areas and under far less eligibility to education and government services, living therefore in a condition similar in many ways to that of illegal immigrants... There are around 130 million such home-staying children, living without their parents, as reported by Chinese researchers."

Of course if the Chinese government was less secretive and obsessed with control, we could probably find more accurate statistics. But then this is the country that tried to discourage the US embassy in Beijing from posting accurate air pollution metrics because they were so embarrassing.

Veering slightly off-topic here, but in addition to what you said, the limitations on internal migration (for Chinese citizens) are absolutely insane by Western standards. Imagine that you couldn't attend school or obtain a driver's license or even legally reside in California despite being born there because your parents were "registered" as Illinois residents and moved without permission. As someone who rarely has to deal with any government agency more oppressive than the local DMV office, I can't imagine living in a country with that level of control over my life, even if they were handing out citizenship papers freely.

why is the test of worthiness for a medical procedure whether it can be "mass marketed"

Because someone has to pay for the research and development - which, please remember, involves large-scale clinical trials to get regulatory approval - and they're not going to front the money for a treatment that has no chance of recouping their investment, unless they have some other personal interest. You can wring your hands all you want about society's priorities, but new medical procedures aren't magically exempt from basic rules of supply and demand.