There is a little talk of it here https://www.mackayandwhitsundaylife.com/article/remembering-...
I had seen him get bitten by a bunch of different snakes during his time demonstrating dangerous animals to my school on different occasions, he was always very kind and educational.
I believe he had was also involved in milking snakes and making antivenom, but the specifics evade me.
I believe he went to many different schools educating the small townships of the Australian outback (Imagine more than 20 less than 30) and always had time to answer my stupid questions as a child.
This part of my local culture will be missed.
Rich people paying whatever it takes to avoid dying provide a captive market for the first case (at least as far as snakes that rich people often get bitten by are concerned), and protein design tools also aim at this kind of shortage.
But as the article points out, most people getting bitten by snakes are affected by the second kind of shortage, because they're too poor to afford several hundred dollars. To address this, the newly-designed antivenom also needs to be cheap enough to manufacture that people actually buy it in large enough volumes that it justifies the initial R&D investment for the manufacturer.
Fake price tags are a huge issue in health care policy.
[0] https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)00781-0/fulltex...
I'm no fan of a system that prices things differently based on how much the dying person (or their insurance) is likely to be able to pay, but in such a system you've got prices dictated by demand... can you really reason your way from prices back to notions of authentic supply?
We already had that.
It was a disaster.
For centuries. No. Millennia.
Until enough people died to make regulation palatable.
Going back to that would be like going back to bloodletting to balance the four humors.
"Oh but baby we've changed" --some random private equity sociopath
"We've got computers now man that changes things, we'll build an ai-enabled pharma tech stack on the blockchain" --some techbro
Thank god a strong and burdensome FDA existed in the United States, back when men were free and America was great.
We might have had other, confounding factors during that time period. And while he did mention "deregulation", he also indicated that he only wanted partial deregulation... that there would still be some demand for purity/dosage.
When people talk about deregulation, there is this idea that regulations already exist. If you're talking about periods from anitquity where no regulations existed at all, this isn't comparable to a period of deregulation where presumably everyone knows what the regulations were trying to accomplish and agree on those and other basic scientific principles. We also had no FAA 10,000 years ago, and no one died in plane crashes then, right? That proves how awesome regulation is in the same way your example proves how awful it is. How can these two arguments reach entirely difference conclusions, do you think?
>"Oh but baby we've changed" --some random private equity sociopath
Or, just possibly, people come to realize over time that their initial knee-jerk reactions went too far, and cause measurable harm that they want to reduce. Unfettered capitalism does get a few things right... it can go from supply shortages to excess quickly. Let it work.