Earlier this week, some of America's top cancer doctors convened in Boston for some intensive brainstorming about future research into the disease. No surprise there, you might think: medical researchers hold numerous conferences each year, and the city has many brilliant doctors.
But this particular gathering, organised by the MIT Sloan School of Management and known as CanceRX, featured a novel twist: next to the oncologists, there were renowned economists such as Andrew Lo (a leading behavioural finance professor) and Robert Merton (the Nobel Prize-winning economist who helped devise the (in)famous Black Scholes model of option pricing). More unusual still, there were bankers and financiers too.
The reason? These days, academics such as Lo are in deep dismay about the lack of progress in beating cancer. For though there have been numerous exciting medical breakthroughs in recent years, he argues that these have not been turning into effective treatments at an equally impressive rate because companies (and shareholders) are unwilling to fund speculative long-term research.