Making well people "better".

AuthorMooney, Pat
PositionThe Risks of the Rush

The strategy of the biotech firms is to use sympathy for the sick to get genetic modification techniques approved, then go for the real profits--selling traits to people who aren't particularly sick.

When heads of state gathered for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago, biotechnology was the buzzword miracle cure for world hunger and disease. A decade later, biotech has brought the poor no closer to the dinner table or better health. The reason is obvious: as ever, the poor are no one's market. Not that progress in biopharmaceuticals has lagged; advances in mapping the human genome have spawned new opportunities, and the prospects for human cloning and stem cell therapies have made headlines. However, the companies involved are actually pursuing more strategic agendas. Reproductive cloning might never be more than a niche market that the industry is happy to leave to quacks. The real money is in human performance enhancement drugs (call them "HyPEs"). And whether the focus is on pharmaceuticals developed the old-fashioned way or those that are linked via research or function to biotechnologies, they employ the same self-serving strategies.

HEALTHY MARKETS

The pharmaceutical industry has always suffered from a seemingly incurable marketing problem. Its customers are sick, and sick people are unreliable. If they die or get well, they stop buying drugs. If they remain sick, they tend to become unemployable. Unemployable sick people either can't afford drugs or (worse) they elicit sympathy and threaten prices. In the mid1970s, pharmaceutical companies saw that the solution to the uncertainty of an ill clientele was to develop drugs for well people, who not only remain employed but never get "better." Best of all, well customers don't create sympathy and threaten price margins and profits. Now, biotechnology and the map of the human genome are making the task of creating new drugs for well people much easier.

Although the birth of biotech a quarter century ago inspired the drive for a brave new market in well-people products, the industry has always been open to the opportunities. Morphine was purified from opium at the outset of the nineteenth century and first commercialized by Merck in Germany in 1827. Bayer was an early proponent of amphetamines and brought the world two blockbuster commercial winners, aspirin and heroin. In 1892, a Parke-Davis publication for doctors provided 240 pages of documentation extolling coca and cocaine, its two leading products; only three of the 240 pages discussed the drugs' unfortunate side effects. (1) Following World War II, the industry routinely blended barbiturates with amphetamines in diet drugs in order to encourage consumers to stay on the regime (and keep buying). (2) Sandoz (now Novartis) invented LSD, though the company was horrified by its abuses. (3)

The industry's view of "recreational" drugs has always been ambiguous. The annual global pharmaceutical market is worth roughly $300 billion, and the illicit narcotics market, valued at $400 billion in 1995, (4) is hugely...

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