A “rare sharing” of research data among scientists is leading to advances in Alzheimer’s research, according to an article published in the New York Times last month. Patients who suffer from Alzheimer’s, a progressive neurological disease of the brain, experience impairment in memory, judgment, decision making, orientation to physical surroundings and language. The collaborative research, begun in 2003, has led to methods of diagnosing Alzheimer’s earlier and to studies testing promising drugs that may slow or stop the disease.
 Collaborative science points to Alzheimer’s treatment |
What makes this sharing of scientific information unusual, of course, is that the corporations responsible for medical research under capitalism treat their findings as proprietary data. Not surprisingly, treating research as intellectual property slows down progress as scientists are not aware of each others’ findings and are duplicating each others’ work. In other words, making profits is more important than treating patients with a debilitating disease such as Alzheimer’s. Keeping research a secret is key under this profit-driven system.
The corporations agreed to this collective Alzheimer’s research project, however, because they did not believe they could achieve profitable results on their own. For one thing, many subjects with varying memory and brain functions were needed to gather meaningful data. And even though the research cannot be patented and findings must be made public, drugs and imaging tests will still be marketed for profit by private companies and accessible only to those patients with the necessary means.
The pharmaceutical industry and health insurance companies are big players in the system of organized crime that is capitalism. Drug companies live on taxpayer-funded research and government-granted monopoly rights in the form of patents. The claim that they need their vast profits to research cures for cancer and other diseases is false. U.S. drug makers spend more on marketing and administration than they do on research—2.5 times more.
Cuba shows another way
In contrast, Cuba’s pharmaceutical industry is not controlled by corporate monopolies driven by profit maximization. Rather, centralized planning and social ownership of the means of production have allowed Cuba to prioritize health care.
Today, socialist Cuba is a leader in the production of cheap generics, providing medicines as well as production assistance to countries that might have otherwise been deprived of much-needed drugs. As of July 2008, Cuba had joint ventures with South Africa, India and China, and technology transfer agreements with Brazil and Iran. In addition, it had worked out joint development deals with Venezuela, Vietnam, China and other countries.
Not only that, Cuba is also a leader in pharmaceutical innovation. The discovery of a new hepatitis B vaccine in the late 1980s helped control the disease at home and in other Latin American countries. In 2002, Louis Baretta, head of a major Canadian pharmaceutical company, said that Cuba’s work on a hepatitis vaccine was likely to become “the standard for the rest of the industry.” In 2008, Cuba registered a therapeutic vaccine for the treatment of advanced lung cancer—the first ever in the world of medical research, shows that sharing rather than competing has greater potential for life-saving results.
Keep profits out of medicine!
