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Sunday, July 6, 2008

Nobel laureate denounces corruption of Medicine


Jon Sulston, who won the Nobel Prize of Medicine in 2002, along with two collaborators, for major genetic and cell functioning research,
has denounced that Medicine is falling into a corrupt spiral, priorizing benefits over the health of patients.

Some people would say it is not corrupt because it is not illegal, and that is true; but I consider that advertising a medicine that doesn't make clear any disadvantages of the medicine, or, in fact, the fact that most people don't need this particular medicine - I would cite, for example, anti-depressants which are hugely oversold, especially in America. This is the sort of thing I mean by corruption. It's not legal corruption; it's moral corruption.

Sulston who is trying to create the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, has also criticised how medicines fail to reach the developing world for the same greedy reasons and in other occasions has opposed the patenting of human genetics information.

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