The winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine Richard J. Roberts denounces the way in which the great pharmaceuticals operate within the capitalist system, putting the economic benefits to health and stopping the scientific advance in the cure of diseases because cure is notas profitable as chronicity.
Can the investigation be planned?
- If I were Minister of Health or the head of Science and Technology, I would look for enthusiastic people with interesting projects;I would give them the money just so they could do nothing but investigate and let them work ten years to surprise us.
- It looks like a good policy.
- It is usually believed that, to get very far, you have to support basic research;But if you want more immediate and profitable results, you must bet on the applied ...
- And isn't it?
- Often, the most profitable discoveries have been asked from very basic questions.Thus was born the gigantic and billionaire American biotech industry for which I work.
- How was born?
- Biotechnology arose when passionate people began to ask if you could clone genes and began to study them and try to purify them.
- A whole adventure.
- Yes, but nobody hoped to get rich with those questions.It was difficult to obtain funds to investigate the answers until Nixon launched the war on cancer in 1971.
- Was it scientifically productive?
- It allowed, with a huge amount of public funds, a lot of research, such as mine, which did not serve directly against cancer, but it was useful to understand the mechanisms that allow life.
- What did you discover?
- Phillip Allen Sharp and I were rewarded for the discovery of introns in Euchartic DNA and the mechanism of gene splicing (Genes splicing).
- What was it for?
- That discovery allowed us to understand how DNA works and, nevertheless, it only has an indirect relationship with cancer.
- What research model seems more effective, the American or the European?
- It is obvious that the American, in which private capital takes part, is much more efficient.Take for example the spectacular advance of the computer industry, where it is private money that finances basic and applied research, but with respect to the health industry ... I have my reservations.
- I listen to him.
- Human health research cannot depend only on its economic profitability.What is good for business dividends is not always good for people.
- explain.
- The pharmaceutical industry wants to serve capital markets ...
- Like any other industry.
- It is not any other industry: we are talking about our health and our lives and those of our children and millions of human beings.
- But they are profitable, they will investigate better.
- If you only think about the benefits, you stop worrying about serving human beings.
- For example ...
- I have proven how in some cases private funds dependent on private funds would have discovered very effective medicines that would have completely finished with a disease ...
- And why do they stop investigating?
- Because pharmacists are often not so interested in cureAn improvement that disappears when it stops taking the medication.
- It is a serious accusation.
- It is common for pharmacists to be interested in lines of research not to cure but only to become chronic ailments with much more profitable chronificing medicationsthat those who cure at all and once and for all.And you just have to follow the financial analysis of the pharmacological industry and check what I say.
- There are dividends that kill.
- That is why he told him that health cannot be one more market or can be understood only as a means to earn money.And that is why I believe that the mixed European model of public and private capital is less easy to encourage such abuses.
- An example of those abuses?
- Antibiotics have stopped investigating because they are too effective and cured at all.As new antibiotics have not developed, infectious microorganisms have become resistant and today tuberculosis, which in my childhood had been defeated, is resurfaceing and has killed one million people this last year.
- Don't you tell me the Third World?
- That is another sad chapter: third world diseases are barely investigated, because the medications that would fight them would not be profitable.But I am talking about our first world: Medicine that cures is not profitable and that is why they do not investigate it.
- Does not politicians intervene?
- Illusions are not made: in our system, politicians are mere employees of the great capitals, who invest what their boys are chosen, and if they do not come out, they buy those who are chosen.
- There will be.
- Capital is only interested in multiplying.Almost all politicians- and I know what I speak- they depend blatantly on those pharmaceutical multinationals that finance their campaigns.The rest are words
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