@La_Chica: there was a specific corporation that for years and years was run by scientists. I was trying to think of it when I made my post and I’m still coming up blank. When I figure it out, I’ll definitely post. We talked about it at length in my business ethics class.
When they had scientists running it, they rarely came out with drugs that hadn’t been tested into ridiculousness and had a lot more controls on what came out. They also worked towards many of the items described above as “cured” or nearly eradicated despite having a good hand on them in first world countries. But they weren’t focused “enough” on profit.
When they moved to their first businessmen as leaders, they came out with a number of drugs that hadn’t been vetted thoroughly enough causing problems when they turned out to have issues, it became harder inside the company to work on diseases that would cure third world problems, but wouldn’t sell for big bucks here. But the profits increased overall.
Since it was a business ethics course, our debate was both about the responsibility of the company: to come out with safe, effective drugs at what rate (fast/slow), for who, at what profit?
The business leaders did better at encouraging faster release of drugs and better profits. The science leaders did better with making sure the drugs were safer and more likely to green light things like curing malaria. As a bad business student, I fell solidly on the scientist leader side, despite there being a very real and very good argument for both sides. I WILL remember what company this was and as SOON as I do, I will post. I dislike putting generalizations into my comments as I did above, but also often mean to come back to questions like this to elaborate, then forget to.
I completely agree that as we age, we will continue to discover more and more diseases that we know nothing about currently that have to do with aging genes or whatever else. As we discover them, we’ll continue to work on them. At the same time, we don’t need companies going through the expensive work of reformulating tylenol 27 different ways so they can throw a new patent on it, re-brand it, and sell it as newer, better, more effective. Reformulating enough to do that is a lengthy, expensive process and I think they could be far more focused on new medicines.
Currently a large amount of medical research is done on government grants and in Universities and that’s great. It’s also done a lot by small start up companies who once they struggle through the first few stages of FDA approval and it looks like they might have a viable drug, they often get eaten by a larger company. That’s good too because they use grants to get to a point where they look viable, then a company takes them over. It’s a system—it’s not perfect, but it does work. It gives our large pharmaceutical companies a certain amount of leeway. And, to be fair, when brand name drugs come out, they really do need to price high. They aren’t just recouping the money spending developing that drug, but the other 99 that didn’t make it that they still had to spend on.
I’ve also got something at the very fringe of my mind—the AIDS medication ethics case we looked at that I’d like to bring up as an example of a pharma company doing EXACTLY the right thing. But I can’t remember the details. I was the only liberal in the class, so a lot of my memories of it are more like “Oh, there was also that AIDS medication case where I said the company should do something, everyone else told me I was stupid, it was actually what the company did and it worked out amazingly well for them, better than anyone could have ever dreamed” than the more useful “Here was the problem, here was the solution, this is the company involved.”
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