<...>
> Until now, making patented drugs has been one the most profitable
legal industries, if not the most profitable, on earth. I doubt that's
going to change profoundly. The U.S. government subsidizes the
industry's basic research costs (NIH, university contracts, etc.) while
industry gets to privatize all the profits. (DH)
well, yeah, this is all true but it doesn't quite capture the complexity of the process--in part because the USG is far from monolithic, and the various agencies involved (NIH [and note that the I stands for InstituteS, plural], FDA, etc.) are in constant conflict with each other. in aggregate, pharmaceuti- cals may continue to be profitable, but only under conditions of exponentially increasing risk for individual companies. ... (TB) -----------------
Well guys, let's flesh the whole drug company thing out a little. The drug companies are only a piece of a bio-science complex that encompasses the medical establishment and the greater heathcare industry, all of which is connected to all the genetic and bio-engineering R&D in private industry and academia funded by NIH, NSF, FDA, and their respective cabinet departments. Whether these pieces quarrel or overlap, isn't as important as seeing their interlocking relationship as a bio-science complex, and seeing the direction this complex is headed--a giant hegemonic profit machine.
The interlocking pieces of this bio-science complex form something like the WWII military industrial complex that Eisenhower noted long ago.
The difference between the two begins with a political, economic and intellectual drift away from the physical sciences and their expression in heavy industries and manufacture. The current general interest, policy and funding shift is toward an emphasis in the development of biological sciences in academic-federal labs and their semi-privatized auxiliary R&D firms. Look around the Univ. of Cal at San Francisco Med Center (UCSF) web page and follow various links to get some idea of how this bio-science, medical, and healthcare system is being re-configured and integrated.
But this aspect of the complex is exclusively devoted to human health and reproduction. The other part of the bio-sphere (plants and animals) is covered in very similarly configured arrangements with academic research labs, NSF, NIH, Dept of Agriculture, and numerous corporate giants involved in the development of food production. For example almost all plant and animal research is done on crop, food, and domestic live stock species.
So, if you combine all of this bio-science in human medicine, health, reproduction with their mirrors in the agriculture industries of crop, live stock, and food production, you can see a very disturbing picture that encompasses every important living thing on the planet--from our own DNA and medical care all the way through the fertilizers, insecticides, and seed stocks for the plants we or the animals we eat, eat.
So what?
Well, consider the mentality of our capitalist pig brethren and their hegemonic madness for merger mania, globalization, and their single minded devotion to maximizing profit no matter what. For example, there is ADM, the PBS sponsor who claims to be the bread basket of the world, or the giant hospital and health insurance consortium, North American Medical Management.
Consider the revolving door between drug companies and academic bio-science research and their theoretical overseers in NSF, NIH, and FDA. Or consider the same general outlines applied to food production with seed companies, agricultural research institutes, fertilizer and insecticide production (big oil) with their theoretical overseers in Depts of Agriculture, Interior, Energy, and Commerce.
What is slowly occuring is the appropriation of all the basic determinants of human life from commonly held traditions and skills in agricultural and rural communities around the world--the removal of that means of life and its transformation into global capitalist production systems. This food-health complex is central to US domination of global markets. The goals and configuration of this complex are determined by whatever dictates issue from US government and corporate interests--neither of which of course share the slightest interests of the communities effected by these policies. You can bet social justice is completely missing from any agenda. But we are no longer talking about just the nasty urban industrial workplace, but all the means of producing the food and reproducing the most basic level of the social structure itself (reproduction, child rearing, socialization, etc)--all of it is headed or already locked into a globalized capitalist profit machine through this slowly evolving bio-science complex.
I realize this all sounds breathlessly paranoid, and in some sense, nothing new. But there is something new here and part of that is the insane drive to merge, control and capitalize on all forms of production of food, health, reproduction, and socialization by transforming these into monolithic integrated systems. I think what we have called 'a service centered economy' is actually this bio-sci complex. It isn't just fast food and mall shopping, although that is part of the system. Services encompass the distribution and delivery of all forms of food and social service like healthcare and medicine--in other words mass society, minus the industrial and manufacturing sectors. The issues are not just the manipulation of capital and credit which are part of the means. But the dictates of those means results in the engineered and completely determined manipulation of whole integrated systems of development, production, distribution, and delivery. Together these form absolutist and hierarchical regimes of power over every aspect of human existence--power devoted solely to squeezing profit out of everything that lives and breaths on the planet.
This bio-sci complex hasn't quite reached a level of awareness and planning, and is not as centralized and hierarchical as its older model, the military-industrial complex. There are many more political and sociological details to work out. Nevertheless the basic international economic and political framework is in place and these have the historical model of the military-industrial complex as a template. As the ethico-legalistic conceptualization becomes more systemized and the gestures toward pseudo-democratic ideals become more proforma, disguised as some neo-liberal crap about human and scientific progress, then the integration of more aspects of a commonly held socio-cultural matrix can be integrated. The methods of integration, beyond the machinations of capital are the now globalized mass media-cultural systems which act to promulgate the necessary ideological schema in conjunction with various international organizations such as the IMF, WTO, WHO and of course the long reach of amer-euro governmental policies.
Some concrete examples, are in order.
Consider what is involved in the amer-euro medicalization of reproduction and child rearing. The basic assumption is that sex, pregnancy, birth, and post-natal care (read service intensive markets) are diseases that are in need of medical supervision and treatment. In other words the basic material of human society is a sickness of radical and chaotic aspect than requires institutional and political management. Such management can be carried out with the capitalist consumer products and services required to bring this disease and its chaos into a proper state of health and under the guidance of prescribed regimes. Thus through the enforcement procedures of national and international institutions and under the ever cheerful and ubiquitous mass media barrage we buy a host of products and services, and submit to regimes and orders of conduct almost none of which are necessary since many of us arrived here in fine condition without them. But that's the genius of consumer capitalism, creating needs where there are none and profiting by them.
The same sort of disease prognosis is performed on agriculture or whole economies were all methods except international corporate systems are diagnosed as hopelessly deficient in the key health indicators of productivity and efficiency--read not profitable to mega-corp international.
One aspect of the bio-sci complex that makes it so insidious is its linkage to a whole schema of secularized ethico-religious or so-called humanitarian justifications. These are the same justifications used to mask the brutal globalization of capitalism under the neo-liberal policies of western democracies. Under this neo-liberal double-speak, everything is for the good of humanity. The goodness of food, the goodness of health, and for the benefit of the people, especially the children and so forth. This is all a complete lie. The only goodness that accrues is measured in the vast sums of wealth that can be harvested from whole peoples and cultures while they are rendered mere chattel, stripped of the means of producing their own sustenance and reproducing their own societies and cultures.
While the material means model of this bio-sci complex can be found in the military industrial complex, the over arching conceptual model lies within the processes of biological systems themselves. The conceptual model takes two forms or has two aspects. The first and most obvious is the precision and completely determinist potential of molecular genetics. The second, and less obvious is the inter-relation of species to form integrated ecological systems. An example of how both aspects can be brought together and coordinated in unison is the development of genetically engineered seeds that produce crops that are infertile and must be purchased each year, but which are also custom matched to specific insecticide and fertilizer regimes. Similarly engineered and integrated systems can be (probably already are) developed for live stock. So it is possible to develop a complete genetically engineered agricultural package from feed grain to live stock including all the auxiliary products necessary for their productivity and health (fertilizers, insecticides, hormones, anti-biotics, etc) all engineered into a integrated miniature ecological system uniformly supplied through some mega-corp conglomerate of the bio-sci complex. And so to fill in the blanks, the international capital system provides the funds to purchase these integrated agricultural systems, which in turn replace existing traditional methods, and thereby harvest profits from whole economies and societies in a global scaled squeeze.
Because the basic genetic and ecological aspects are the same for humans as for the rest of the bio-sphere, there exists the potential to perform the same sort of integrated bio-sci development in human populations and re-configure the socio-cultural institutions to act in consort and unison. So we return to the profitability of the drug companies and their mergers, or the food and agricultural industries and its mergers, or the medical and health care industries and their mergers.
I should probably close my rant by noting most of this is a still just a potential. It exists piecemeal because nobody has yet put it all together. However, it seems to me there are plenty of corporate and bio-sci people working away furiously to create such systems. Of course they delude themselves into thinking their work is for the greater good. I think that is what is behind all the genetics and bio-engineering we read about from cloned sheep to custom seed stocks. On the human health and reproduction side, the same interlocking system of dependencies and linkages with large capital producing systems is what is behind all the health industry mergers and the equally furious research in genetics and bio-engineered medicine and health maintenance regimes. The similarities and linkages between agriculture and medicine are natural directions because the underlying biology is the same.
If I wanted to predict what the 21st century will look like, I would simply extend what happened under 19-20thC industrial development with its emphasis on the physical sciences, and project that into the shift of emphasis on the biological and social sciences and their potential for exploitation in food and health systems. It seems invitable that global robber barons of a bio-sci complex will arrive and will commit the same sorts systematic exploitations as their predecessors. I don't worry about cloned people so much as cloned plants and animals because there are few profits to be made by cloning people. But the consequences of this potential bio-sci exploitation by the yet to be lords of food and health could certainly overwhelm any disasters that Mao or Stalin committed under their enforced agrarian reforms.
So, hopefully the above crank on the darkness of bio-science helps to answer Doug's question:
"Yeah, I thought Ted Byfield's skepticism about drug profits was overdone, and still do, but then I started wondering - how can any industrial sector so consistently earn a rate of profit so far above average? While it's hard to imagine Merck ending up like Bethlehem Steel, how can the continue to pull down these megabucks? Drug prices are substantially lower in Europe, where they're negotiated by national health authorities, than they are in the U.S., right? So are the keys to the industry's megaprofits the absence of regulation in the U.S. combined with strict controls on intellectual property? Or does the industry get some "life itself" exemption from the laws of profit equalization?" (Doug H)
Yes to all the above, but also its because these pigs see the kind of future I just depicted. They already are bigger than Bethlehem Steel. You just have to blur the outline a little to see it.
Chuck Grimes