Asks Peter Wilby in Comment is Free. Wilby, who is a history graduate and newspaper editor, argues that “a traveler from 1950 to the present would find little to amaze beyond the internet, PCs, mobile phones and, perhaps, how old technologies had become infinitely more reliable”.
Although Wilby refers to a hypothetical traveler spanning the preceding five decades, I feel it would be better to allow a bit of latitude as Wilby is not offering equal time periods. This traveler, Wilby suggests, would have been astonished by “phones, planes, cars, electricity, fridges, radio, TV, penicillin and so on”.
Admittedly, the final two did not exist in a recognizable form in 1900. Television, however, could be compared to the new fangled motion pictures, with the first picture houses opening in the late 1890s. Although no antibiotics existed in 1900 (and could have saved my grandfather’s first wife from rheumatic fever four decades later), a medical world in 2012 with only penicillin would be a poorer one.
One of Wilby’s principle complaints is that large pharmaceutical companies are strangling innovation and development through their acquisitory pursuit of ownership of treatments and technologies, which he backs up with reference to GlaxoSmithKline’s recent whopping fine of $3 billions for bribing medical staff to prescribe unsuitable medication.
There is no point in defending this corporation’s actions. As referred to BTL, however, just as anti-biotics have moved on from rudimentary penicillin, so too has molecular pharma-science such as the dismantling and reconstruction of treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia allowed by massive investment. Wilby dismisses investment in this technology as a ‘mere’ 1.3% of revenues in the US, although I suspect even he would agree that one advance over the past six decades has been the understanding of isomerism in drugs such as thalidomide.
That GlaxoSmithKline was able to pursue its disreputable behaviour for so long clearly was a failure with the regulators, although Wilby’s dismissal of it and the rest of the industry as rent-seekers seems a bit much. Not just the benefits which can and do arise from rent-seekers who, through their accrual of capital are able to invest it in industry or research, but also as his suggestion for rectifying it is the implementation of another rent-seeking class of HR departments and administrators and bureaucrats to oversee the inherently untrustworthy big business.
Oh, and mobile phones are not single pieces of technology. They consist of an array of recent innovations which have applications elsewhere to checking HP on the move.
