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"Modern medicines are weapons blunted by compromise. All they need to do is home in on a target and hit hard· More like cluster bombs than guided missiles, · the force of the hit inevitably comes down to a trade-off between a medicine's effect on the disease and its effect on you." (Crow, 2013, para. 1)
So speaks his damning report on the state of pharmacology, where profits trump performance and lasting success eludes the medical profession. Cancer research has been on the forefront of medical innovation for decades, and scientists and journalists alike herald the advance of some ephemeral cure for cancer, relegating it to the bygone status of tuberculosis or cholera.
While modern medicinal technology does indeed hold a real potential for success, the thalidomide scandal reveals another perspective, namely an industry ready to drive a generation into Dante's inferno in the elusive pursuits of a panacea.
The term panacea is derived from the eponymous Greek goddess who was associated with healing.
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Meaning all-healing, the quest for a panacea eluded alchemists in the Middle Ages as they searched for the "elixir of life." Centuries of often pseudoscientific research has shown that a true panacea does not exist, just alchemists never did turn lead into gold.
By the twentieth century, modern medical science had joined religion in conclusively rejecting the notion of endless life, realizing the complexities of the human body. That is to say, the public believes that researchers are engaged in much more limited tasks; however, this belief is upon occasion mistaken.
For obvious reason, the plight of cancer patients remains on the forefront of the medical research. Ever since the mid-twentieth century, researchers have slogged towards the cure for cancer and the press has perpetuated an endless cycle of research grants and pharmaceutical products. Some contend that modern drug research could revolutionize the industry by allowing for specially targeted drugs to make their mark on the malevolent illness.
In a potentially ground-breaking work of research published in the New Scientist, James Crow holds that "a new class of minuscule, multifunctional stealth drugs, · equipped with stealth cloaks to pass through the bloodstream, · can be programmed to deliver their toxic cargo on cue exactly where it is needed and nowhere else." (2013, para. 3)
Such an invention would transform the contra-cancer industry, allowing it to target and eradicate such tumours, but its potential goes much further. Viruses could be targeted with a scientific precision and bacteria removed with a prodigious efficiency. In fact, sickness and illness might be eradicated altogether, and the new scientists would have realized a panacea through the marvels of modern medicine.
As such pharmacological developments demonstrate, this quest for utopian health is not unique to the scientific community of the twenty-first century. Rather, researchers have for centuries produced products claiming to end all problems and satiating the appetite of an unhygienic populace for life.
According to Joseph Stromberg, writing for the Smithsonian Magazine, those who "suffered from a medical ailment in the year 1900· could take everything from Dr. Tutt's Liver Pills to Hollister's Golden Nugget Tablets, Dr. Sawen's Magic Nerving Pills or Dr. Comfort's Candy-Covered Cathartic Compound." (2013, para. 1)
Stromberg goes on to say that these so-called remedies were often little more than mash-ups of ineffective household remedies and, in some cases, contained lethal ingredients. Lacking proper quality-control measures, the populace was often duped into buying impotent or adversely potent substances. Unless the scientific method is scrupulously and meticulously followed, modern medicine will follow the path of medieval alchemists and Edwardian charlatans.
Such subversive substances are not merely the relics of a bygone era, but improperly tested substances continue to shake society from time to time.
In 1962, then-United States' President John F. Kennedy awarded a relatively obscure Canadian physician, Frances Kelsey, the U.S. President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for saving the American people from one such drug. An ordinary bureaucrat working within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Kelsey played an outsized role in saving thousands of helpless infants from a deadly compound: thalidomide.
Thalidomide was, in the truest sense of the word, a promising panacea developed by the German pharmaceutical Gr?nenthal. In a country scarred by the Second World War, the conglomerate brought medicine and hygiene, making a profit by curing the ill.
One of its newly researched sleeping pills also had a side benefit in relieving pregnant women of morning sickness. When released for the European market in the late 1950s, thousands of people embraced the marvellous new drug. The sedative's potential remained unbounded, new uses being continually discovered.
This drug was touted as the safest of its kind as the company could not find a dose high enough to kill a rat. By 1960, 46 countries were using the treatment and its sales rivalled those of aspirin. Thalidomide was touted as a remedy for a variety of ailments, and with the irrepressible marketing of Gr?nenthal, it was seen as a panacea.
This widespread thalidomide use coincided with rising rates of phocomelia across the Western world. This ailment refers to missing or malformed limbs and a plethora of other developmental defects in infants. During the years of thalidomide use, "somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 'thalidomide babies' were born with terrible defects, including blindness, deafness, cleft palate, and malformed and missing limbs." (Bunner, 2002, p. 98)
Thalidomide also caused significantly greater rates of miscarriages and infant mortality. All in all, the thalidomide fiasco was responsible for the death and misery of untold tens of thousands of infants.
By failing to conduct proper testing, Gr?nenthal and the various public health agencies hold the blood of these children on their hands, not to mention the blood of the millions of infants who have been aborted (according to Celeste McGovern, writing for Paul Bunner, the "thalidomide scare" directly motivated radical feminists to call for the right to euthanize thalidomide babies).
Thalidomide revolutionized the approval process for new medicines; the FDA conducted a massive overhaul in response to the major blunder averted only by the actions of a courageous Canadian. This led to a higher financial cost to companies and the public for the approval of new medicines but ensured that this ought to never happen again.
For instance, the U.S. Military's Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) is actively developing multi-target pharmacological interventions, which take five years to just enter the regulatory phase.
Though panacea still hold great potential, their development also comes at a great cost to companies, both moral and financial, and is thus restrained. As many promising drugs have become catastrophic failures, the risks in developing a cure-all drug are only increasing.
Risks abound in the research of panacea; thalidomide compels scientists to examine them. They bargain away the lives of infants and the infirm in some cataclysmic gambling venture, making their name in history as either humanity's saviour or its slayer.
They may pave the way for further immoral vices and heap bloodguiltiness upon bloodguiltiness. They also risk costly lawsuits and the wrath of a distraught population.
The cure-all drug demands an investment, one of time, money, and of one's soul. In the quest for perfection, humanity gambles away the virtue it once had to merely delay the inevitable, namely death. Because, as is often repeated in universities, entropy exists, humanity's attempt to climb a scientific Babel must once again prove futile.
Ethical, Legal, and Financial Complications. (2019, Dec 20). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/ethical-legal-and-financial-complications-essay
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