Prescription for Profits: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Bankrolled the Unholy Marriage Between Science and Business

by Linda Marsa

Book Overview

Prescription for Profits: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Bankrolled the Unholy Marriage Between Science and Business is a revealing look at the world of research science--and the way it has been... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684800020
• ISBN13: 9780684800028
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Gold core, rough edges

Very fine investigative reporting on the two main themes: (1) the machinations of Genentech in bringing its products to market, sometimes with inadequate testing and plenty of political pressure, and (2) the fraud at the NCI in claiming first isolation of HIV and the pressure used to obtain a patent for a detection method for it in competition with the Pasteur Insititute, which was really first doing both. The use of federal tax dollars and university labs to fund drug research that would benfit an individual corporation was exposed along with the resulting secrecy and aggression so alien on campuses in the past. Some history was not so hot. The origin of the? modern age of medicine? did not occur in 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, a drug. One could date it from 1897 when Felix Hoffman at Bayer A. G. was searching for new products and recognized that acetylsalicylic acid would ease arthritis pain, leading to aspirin. The modern method of mass screening of compounds as potential drugs began in 1899 when Paul Ehrlich was appointed Director of The Institute for Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt. By 1910 the first treatment for syphilis, Salvarsan, 606, the 606th compound, was launched. I have read opposite views of the relative merits of the Salk and Sabin vaccines for polio, and of the characters of each. My late wife claimed that Sabin had sexually assaulted her at a medical meeting!

A somber vison of the future

This book is timely, well written, thoroughly researched and extremely disquieting. The usual human limitations including greed, dishonesty, arrogance and hubris are documented in a convincing fashion as they relate to scientists, government and commerce and there is little, if any reason, to be sceptical of the events which are described in considerable detail.The importance of the book, in my opinion, is that it bears the same relationship to a vital area of molecular biology that Rachel Carson's Silent Sping did to critical issues of environmental pollution. Poisioning the environment and poisoning the manner in which we process scientific information are both extremely destructive activities. The hallmark of the scientific method has always been the free exchange of information between its practioners. This book shows quite clearly that we as a nation have embarked upon the dangerous path of treating scientific information as a commodity rather than as a freely available, continuous source of ideas for some of our best minds to consider and further develop. In the long run this is of no benefit to society. This book suggests, that in the short run, it is also of little if any benefit.I believe, there is much benefit in reviewing the history of the development of the transistor by Bell Laboratories and the manner in which that organization made this device available to a large number of competitors. No one can argue that the process employed did not lead to benefits for society which exceeded even the most extravagant predictions. A major review of the processes by which scientific information, gathered in large part at a cost to the tax payers, and then utilized to develop commercial ventures is long overdo. It is however doubtful that such will be the case unless the importance of this issue is recognized. The author has performed an important service in this regard.