I'm working at the National Institutes of Health doing Technology Transfer for their Neuroscience division. Basically, my job is to work through the regulatory jungle to help a certain technology get to market, usually by commodifying the NIH's IP rights and finding a third party bio-tech firm willing to invest.

What struck me the most was how many different types of individuals I had to work with to get something done.

There is the investigator (scientist) who only wants to do research for the sake of doing research, and doesn't really care about it translating into the real world.

There is the FDA reviewer who has to abide by the regulatory red tape in every facet of the process, making me take detours to circumvent irrelevant concerns in order to arrive at the same destination.

And then there is the actual office bureaucracy, where massaging egos goes alot further than a good idea or some new insight.

It's not that I don't get anything done, but the top-down regulatory system is, in my opinion, inherently inefficient. In a perfect world (i.e. a world Eben would be satisfied in), these barriers would not exist. But, as we learned, we do not live in anything close to a perfect world.

-- MikeAbend - 20 Jun 2010