HIS32960 Pills, Patents & Policies

Academic Year 2022/2023

Over the past 140 years, a pharmaceutical revolution has transformed our lives. Across the world, billions people have used sophisticated technologies ranging from vaccines to antibiotics to combat once lethal diseases. Many others rely on regular access to insulin, statins, and hormones to manage their health and bodies. Meanwhile, increasingly fine-grained diagnostics allow us to identify various risk factors long before any actual disease manifests. But access to these breakthroughs has never been even. While Western healthcare systems spend an ever-greater part of their income on pharmaceuticals and big companies earn record profits, large parts of the world’s population still have uneven or no access to lifesaving drugs. This is despite a long history of therapeutic experimentation on non-European bodies and the increased outsourcing of often highly polluting pharmaceutical manufacturing to the Global South.

Pills, patents, and policies lifts the veil on triumphs, challenges, and failures of the biomedical revolution. Focusing on the long 20th century (ca. 1880 to COVID-19), the course introduces students to the dynamic world of public and commercial research, intellectual property, and global supply chains that made the pharmaceutical revolution possible. Students will learn how the early 19th century saw a new mode of systematised biomedical research, global bioprospecting, and industrial production and marketing lay the groundwork for a steady stream of pharmaceutical breakthroughs. They will also explore how resulting fallouts such as fatalities resulting from contaminated products or unexpected adverse effects laid the ground for a new system of safeguards like clinical trials and regulatory agencies that we still rely on. Focusing on the evolution of pharmaceutical innovation and marketing, students will also study how the 20th century saw new forms of venture capitalism, molecular innovation, and global supply chains require different approaches protecting intellectual property – and how resulting legal frameworks helped cement health inequalities in poorer parts of the world.

At the end of the course, students will have gained insight into the origins, evolution, winners, and losers of the biomedical world they inhabit. In addition to exploring relevant secondary literature, they will have also gathered useful experience in working with a range of primary sources including pharmaceutical journals, newspapers, business reports, scientific papers, official reports, and judicial hearings.