That's correct.
> "If we were running a trial for an oncology drug that requires an infusion, a pharmacist who had placed a bet saying that it's gonna work well, or doesn't work well, could obviously adjust the infusion rate, could adjust the source temperature of the drug," he said. "They could change any number of variables that could obviously have a direct impact [on] how the trial and the data and the patient safety would come out."
Funnily enough, a prediction market arguably improves this situation as well. A pharmacist, or one of their relatives, openly taking a large position against a trial's success would be far more likely to attract scrutiny than, say, a pharmacist being secretly paid by a competitor to interfere with the trial.
And in the latter case, if the trial's outcome deviated sharply from a market consensus, that discrepancy could itself provide a reason for closer scrutiny.
What is this referring to?
I don't think there's a smoking Molotov there yet, but the incentives sure don't seem great!
Doesn't seem a huge leap there. Nor does a pissed off janitor who could turn $100 into $1,000 by trashing the wrong samples. Or a bigger player who can turn their $500k into $5M by paying that janitor $1,000.
Not to excuse these guys for all their other awfulness of course.
But yes, there is portion of "investing" that is actually gambling. That is what Enron did and it threw down the economy. Those gamblers usually loose and we have quite a lot of regulations trying to restrict the impact of that gambling.
And yes, the usual suspect hate those regulations.
As with most terrible behaviors when a few people do it the results to society aren't so bad. When it gains potential for mass application of the same behavior it becomes a crisis.