Eroom's law

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Our secret stash of
Drugs
Icon drugs.svg
Highs and lows

Eroom's law is an observation-based law which states that in the last decades, the progression of drug discovery is slowing down while the cost of developing a new drug rises, and oftentimes the new drug is only slightly more effective then old ones for the same symptom. To be more precise, the cost to develop new drugs doubles roughly every 9 years, after taking inflation into consideration.[1]

The name Eroom is Moore spelt backwards, as an homage to Moore's Law, to signify the stark contrast between what has happened to drug development and what has happened to microchips.

So far nothing has successfully reversed the decelerating trend of drug discovery, neither computer assisted approaches like high-throughput screening and computer-assisted drug design, or other approaches like biotechnology, have changed this trend, despite the miraculous developments of computer hardware in the last decades.

Because the speed of technological growth has been decelerating in most fields of science and technology for decades,[2] there are reasons to think that laws similar to Eroom's law are the rule, rather than the exception, of technological development in modern times, and the progress of computer hardware is an exceptional case that gives a delusion that the pace of technological development is exponential in recent years.

References[edit]

  1. Hall, Jeremy; Matos, Stelvia; Gold, Stefan; Severino, Liv S. (2018-01-20). "The paradox of sustainable innovation: The 'Eroom' effect (Moore's law backwards)" (PDF). Journal of Cleaner Production. 172: 3487–3497. Bibcode:2018JCPro.172.3487H. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.07.162. ISSN 0959-6526.
  2. Park, Michael; Leahey, Erin; Funk, Russell J. (2023). "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time". Nature. 613 (7942): 138–144. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05543-x. ISSN 1476-4687.