Pay rise

Lol. Maybe. Though that’s generally a fallacy. It turns out that while pay is an important motivator, it doesn’t generally work to expect higher pay will result in better quality or quantity work from the same individual. It is well documented and many of us have personal experience with persons making large salaries who have the same attitude or work ethic as those making minimum wage who might say things like “they don’t pay me enough to ask me to do that” or “I’m just phoning it in. They already barely pay me to do what I do now.” Or similar. So generally speaking no matter how much we make, most work unless it is work we truly enjoy and is flexible, will see like a poor trade for the money. Part of it is the commonality of short term thinking- while we are at work we tend to lose some freedom and face unpleasantness, but we generally do not get the money or at least cannot use the money in a meaningful way until we are off work.

It turns out that being interested and invested in one’s work, having some level of challenge with incremental rewards, feeling trusted, appreciated, and valued, flexibility to structure a personal life and have some freedom and control, overall enjoyment of the job, and a general work ethic or personal drive tend to work best to get good results from workers. You can’t generally pay a worker in such a way that the amount feels rewarding and the intervals are regular and constant throughout each work day. High pay can make a person attached to a job in that they want to keep their salary- but such sentiment more often creates workers that tend to do bare minimums and attempt to not cause “waves” as opposed to triggering growth. It also often simply gives workers a tool in finding another job for higher pay. If they aren’t happy except for the money- there is no reason not to quit cancer research to go work on crispr hair dye or something if the pay is better.

But you aren’t far from the truth in looking at money as a major culprit in why cancer hasn’t been “cured” (if such a thing can be said to be possible..) Chiefly that IP rights allow companies to own entire genes. While companies insist that this helps research because a bio com won’t invest a billion dollars to map a genome of once they pay to do it, anyone can use the research they funded to make products- in practice or means that a single study of how a single cell type reacts to to a drug could involve hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in licensing fees to be able to even look at or work with certain genes. May papers are likewise behind pay walls and so not only is researched slowed or halted because of the needs to gain authorization and approvals for various licenses- but scientists can’t really just run idea after idea to see what works. It is rather messy.