Comments Elsewhere

Are you advocating privately funded and privately conferred prizes here, or are you advocating Stiglitz’s actual suggestion, which amounts to reviving the Stalin Prize in science and engineering?

If the former, then, sure, why not. If the latter, though, then the whole idea raises the question of where the governments of the “industrialized nations” (either severally or jointly) got the knowledge, the virtue, or the right to put themselves forward as qualified arbiters of the usefulness or importance of new drugs. The sort of “status” that a panel of professional blowhards and usurpers could convey on scientific geniuses deserves their contempt and nothing more. Any scientists who would be motivated by such “prizes” are perfect examples of the psychological deformities imposed by a sick culture, and we’d be better off convincing them of the hollowness of political honors than setting up State Prize committees to pander to their vanity.