The NY Times has a nice article on a female biotechnology entrepreneur who is the “cutting edge” in India. Of course, as she admits, that’s not saying much, India of all Third World nations has a built-in philosophical aversion to messing with God’s creation since its religion tends to deify the Creation itself in a way that dualistic Western monotheism does not. Of course, it’s nice to see that fat luddite pigs don’t have a monopoly on the female scientific scene in India. Why do I use the term “fat luddite pig”? Click the link, and note the ample proportions of the beast that argues against GMOed foods because they are “unsafe.” Unfortunately, if the people who are being protected die an early death because of malnutrition, that argument might seem somewhat moronic….
Godless comments:
The Times didn’t mention India’s biggest medical area field: generic drug manufacturing. As Derek Lowe puts it:
What’s terrible about this foolishness is that India has a tremendous pool of scientific talent. For many years, much of it has left: you’d be hard pressed to find a technology-based US company of any decent size without Indian nationals working there. But they’re finding plenty to do at home now, and they could keep on doing it. Or everyone could get into astrology – that’s an option, too, and it has the benefit of being spiritual. You’re damn well going to need a spiritual outlook if you go across a bridge that was built using Vedic math.Everyone knows about the Indian software industry. Not many people realize that there are a lot of seriously good chemists there, too. India’s past practice of ignoring international patent law has led to a large talent pool of process chemists, handy at coming up with efficient ways to knock off patented drugs. But now there’s a strong home-grown pharmaceutical research firm (Dr. Reddy’s) which is licensing new drug candidates to large companies in Europe and the US. So, should they keep on doing that?
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India laughs at patents. They always have. The companies there appropriate drugs, turn them over to their very competent process chemists, and crank them out on scale. Sometimes they’ve come up with more economical synthetic routes than the original company ever did. The Times calls India’s drug market “brutally competitive,” but it’s a brutal competition to see who’s quickest at ripping off the foreigners who actually discovered the drug. Getting approval to sell generic Glivec took a few months, “swift by American standards,” says the article. Make that impossible by American standards, or more clearly, illegal by American standards (and the rest of the world’s,) and you have a better picture. Mind you, this approval was “unusually long and tedious” by Indian reckoning.Doctors in India, though, the article says, realized “. . .the pragmatic aims of the company’s philanthropy. The giveaway was a means, they contend, to establish a commerical beachhead. . .” Shock me. This is how the market works, the seeking of competitive advantage. In this case, it turns out that there’s an advantage to giving some of the drug out for free (or at least a disadvantage for not doing it.)
Haven’t any of these people read anything by Adam Smith? Hasn’t anyone at the Times? And, as it turns out, the Indian generic companies have felt the pressure, and are stepping up to supply the drug to people in the free program. Good for them. Smith would be able to tell them that it’s not all coming from the goodness of their hearts, and properly so.
What Hong Kong is to software piracy, India is to drug piracy… 😉
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