Lack of Hyperactivity Disorder

It occurred to me recently that my family has ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). This came as a surprise to me, because my wife is very focused and calm, and my little girl is normal enough,(my baby just born) but we live in an ADHD city. So much seems different in our of lives in 2011 than it did even 10 years ago. I notice this as I drive through Brooklyn, using my GPS to navigate streets, and traffic warnings, while my wife searches houses that are for sale on an interactive Zillow app on her Android phone, and my five year old daughter plays “Angry Birds” on my I-Phone from the back seat. My lap top from this year has an Intel processor with 3 more cores than my wife's from last year. These are all big changes, but can ultimately be looked at as incremental improvements over previous technologies. (Though I am not sure about “Angry Birds”, as I don't see why it is actually more advanced than “Frogger” which I was playing in 1984, but that is not the point). Technology has benefited from both continued creative mania, and incremental progress both. Technologists, and the technology they developed, going as far back as Edison, have been rather like cases of children learning about gravity and physiology, and eventually being able to walk. It has been messy at times. Edison tried thousands of filaments before finding the right one for the Incandescent bulb. Google was founded, and according to now CEO founder Larry Page, continues to run like the Montessori schooling that both founders grew up in; that is building upon knowledge through a trial and error way, which embraces the distracted nature of children rather than suppresses it. New studies about the creativity that comes from daydreaming (and REM sleep where actual dreaming occurs) and creativity suggest that the attention deficit may at times be a benefit rather than a hindrance.So we see Google with 10% of engineers time being devoted to trying whatever they want. We see App developers making as diverse things as heart rate monitors to bar code scanners for the I-Phone. This is true for many technologies, but not all. The big exception, is pharmaceuticals, where every year less new drugs are released, there are more failures and there are higher costs to do business. I was lucky enough to hear about this from three of the most qualified people to talk on the subject at a Rockefeller University conference this week. The prognosis was not good, as trend from the 1996 until now show the downward path I described, these former executives explained some possible reasons including  excessive FDA intervention, new technologies, such as bio markers, not being utilized, too much consolidation and more. At one point one of these former CEO’s pointed out something that I recognized as a key difference in pharmaceutical advances and other technologies, when he explained how incremental growth is no longer possible. He used past experience as a gage for today's stagnation, through the example of hyper tension medication. He explained that hypertension medication had improved significantly in 20 years from the time he started in the drug industry in the 1970’s, but that it was incremental innovation. No one clear moment saw a drug that was significantly better than the previous. He feels that this is no longer possible due to government and insurance company risk aversion. I have no experience in the drug business, so he may or may not be right about the causes, but the result of no incremental change is a huge contrast to other technologies. Nearly every year new Intel and AMD processors will be released for instance. They are not huge departures from the previous years processors, but over 3 to 5 years the old processors seem like an artifact from ancient Egypt. The same of course can be said for memory, where my usb hard drive drive of 2 years ago is 4 times as big, with half the memory of the one I bought last week. Yet for my meds? My meds do what the industry admits. They work great in some areas, and those areas were perfected 15 years ago. For cancer drugs, much of the treatment has not changed. There are areas of great progress, and I have been helped by some those drugs (as well as the old but still useful cancer treatments), and that is in anxiety, depression and yes, ADHD medication. In essence the successes of the pharmaceutical industry have been in drugs that seem to address the same frenetic energy of technologies successes. This is likely a coincidence, but is one the industry may want to consider. While drug development has become calmed of hyperactivity, and anxiety, it has lost it’s edge, and the ability to innovate. Maybe the problem is as much in those labs and corporate offices as at the FDA.