Well there's hundreds if not thousands of different kinds of plastics. Some are amazing and more expensive than gold...I think there's some like that, they're just currently very difficult to manufacture and highly miraculous, like they resist really high temperatures and...endless virtue. Reading Plastics I think makes specialty plastics.
Clinical trials...you know I've lost absolutely all respect for any number that a doctor or hospital reports. The sixes could be upside-down 9's. As the palindrome goes, si es nueve, se ve un seis. Just fudge numbers in embarrassing childish ways, the Sacklers specialize in that. A friend was telling me, initially he thought statistics in medicine could be heavily slanted.
No.
They can make whatever shit they want up, literally no limits. Science as a means of getting knowledge has some benefits and some shortcomings. In particular the scientist can just lie, and the other scientists in general won't verify what he said, the rewards are for coming up with the theory, not dismantling lies. Plus there's careers and power involved, you can't just call a prestige institution scientist a liar, he'll be pissed, he'll go through your science and find your errors and get a colleague he can deny knowing to publish that. Chomsky did this to the Piraha linguist. Academia is sharp elbows. With doctors, holy shit, you can't just say eg Jorge Barros is a bad scientist, he's the dean of a prestige institution, where is your prestige to speak against him? Which prestige institutions have you gone to?
Science is easily prostituted. I did it myself in the sixth grade, handed in work I did at last minute on the bus ride to school, which was supposed to take eight hours. Perfect score. Although apparently the work was correct, I didn't actually do the process to arrive at that answer. It's just not a very robust heuristic for acquiring knowledge. It's easily understood, I learned the scientific method in the third grade, probably a simplified version of it, but I don't see any better in the academic papers I read. Plato said so, science sucks for acquiring knowledge, math yeah but science no.
By this point I don't trust a single FDA number. Like the letters a bit, but not one number. Not one. Can't call them on the phone because I have no idea which numerals are secretly supposed to be which others, don't know the secret codes, when to dial a 3 when it says to dial an 8. Like OK they can make sure bacon is safe even for secular Jews whom are really vulnerable to bad pork, and make sure aspirin I buy at pharmacies for the occasional headache isn't loaded with crystal meth for repeat business, barely. That's about it. Like after the Sacklers bribed them into saying 7 equals 12 it's just not the same. Tortured hundreds of thousands of people--fucking with people's pain medication is for sure torture--and only had to give up a fraction of the ill-gotten gains. Sacklers did that again only in that case it was 60 equals 100.
FDA is just impossible to respect at this point. It's not even 2+2 is 5, that involves addition, it's an understandable mistake for like a 4-year-old compared to this shit, this is just fucking with the identity of numbers. Fucking with the metric system, with the passage of time itself, the units, and all the patients who suffer. Just fucking with all patients, and fucking with me.
Well they've always been known violers. They're captured by big pharma to justify charging crazy prices for chemicals that cost a dollar per gram to manufacture. R&D cost masochism. They fuck over small companies developing new drugs too, in darkness and silence (very muffled screaming). There's tons of cures that don't reach the market because FDA fucks up--openly--medical trials. Human error, but oh whoops you have to pay for it all over again if you want to put it on the market. Well in that case the VC's fucked that company...the company got double-teamed.
FDA is alchemy. Makes gold out of trivially cheap organic chemicals. The opposite of Reading Plastics.