Institutional Research
The Flexner Report, Rockefeller medicine, regulatory capture, and the history of how institutions shaped what counts as medicine.
3 articles
Well established
They Found It in a Plant, Patented the Molecule, and Called It Medicine: The Documented List
Between 40% and 70% of pharmaceutical drugs in clinical use today are derived from or directly modeled on plant compounds used by traditional cultures for centuries before pharmaceutical companies isolated, modified, and patented them. In every case, the traditional knowledge holder received nothing. This is the documented origin list, compound by compound.
Well established
Why Natural Medicine Cannot Be Funded: The Patent System, the Flexner Report, and a Century of Structural Incentives Against Plant-Based Research
The pharmaceutical research system cannot fund natural compound research because patents require novelty and plants are not novel. The Rockefeller Foundation gave over $50 million to pharmaceutical medical schools and nothing to herbal medicine schools. The NIH office for natural therapy research receives 0.3% of the total budget. These compounds were not found ineffective. They were defunded.
Well established
Harvard Scientists Were Paid to Blame Fat for Heart Disease. The Documents Are in JAMA.
JAMA Internal Medicine published in 2016 that the Sugar Research Foundation paid three Harvard scientists $6,500 in 1967 to produce a literature review blaming dietary fat for heart disease. The funding was not disclosed. One author later wrote the first federal dietary guidelines. The resulting low-fat era replaced animal fats with sugar and seed oils in the American food supply.