Science and Inquiry discussion

For March 2020, we will be reading The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager.

Please use this thread to post questions, comments, and reviews, at any time.

I've started this early & am really enjoying it. It wanders back & forth in time quite a bit, but it just proves that we all stand on the shoulders of giants & that nothing about medicine is simple. It's really interesting how Lister's techniques got overused, for instance.

I finished it & gave it a 5 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I can't wait to discuss it with the group. It was so much more than just a history of Sulfa & Domagk. Really incredible.

This is a really excellent book.

I never knew how important sulfa drugs were in the history of antibacterials. I has always assumed that penicillin was the first successful antibacterial drug, but it appears that sulfa drugs had a much earlier impact. Also, even though penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming, nothing came of his discovery until Florey and Chain produced it on a mass scale. Florey and Chain deserve much greater credit than Fleming does.

But this book doesn't really go into that story so much. Instead, it focuses on the development of Sulfa drugs and the tragic life of its discoverer. It does a great job describing the race for different producers to come up with variant designs, some of which were even better than Domagk's original design.

There's a real lesson here about how medical innovation operates. Taken together with the Elixir incident covered in the later chapters, it also shows how delicate the balance between too much and too little regulation of drugs. It leaves one to wonder whether a stricter FDA would have prevented the Elixir poisoning, but would also have stopped or slowed down the rapid innovation of the other sulfa compounds, leaving Domagk's inferior molecule as the only established safe option, which didn't work as well for syphilis, for example. And that doesn't even consider the effect of patent law on this question.

It's not a question Hager discusses too much in this book, but reading the story in such detail gives you enough facts to think about the positive and negative impact of patent law and regulation upon the medical industry and drug innovation.

I was shocked by the patent laws. I wonder how much of Domagk's reluctance to try just the sulfa compound was caused by it not being eligible for a patent. Hager discusses it in some length & I liked that he came to no conclusion. He gave us the facts & some suppositions, but that was all.

I finished this book last week and really enjoyed it. Like other commenters above I found the complex history of a major medical innovation fascinating. So many different people were involved in a number of different countries. Here is my review.

I liked this book, too. I plan to re-read it.

Jim wrote: "I was shocked by the patent laws. I wonder how much of Domagk's reluctance to try just the sulfa compound was caused by it not being eligible for a patent. Hager discusses it in some length & I lik..."

I found it interesting that, at that time in Germany, they couldn't patent the resulting substance, only the process. I don't think that's the way it currently works in the U.S. What about other countries? Does it even make a difference?

I've always thought it was wrong that someone had the ability to patent a gene because he was the one who discovered it's existence. How can a researcher or company own a gene? Admittedly that's a little different (or a lot different) from patenting a medicine that you created/discovered, but it makes me suspect the whole patent process.

I think Matt Ridley talks a bit about that in Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.

I don't understand our patent system now much less in the past & other countries. I understand the thinking behind it, but have never understood how it works out in practice. Eli Whitney spent most of his profits from inventing the cotton gin defending his patent, IIRC. An early inventor of the TV was legally beat up by RCA (I think) until his patent ran out & they could use the tech for free. I was told epi-pens are so expensive because the device was patented, but I clearly remember them being part of our gas mask kit when I was in the Army & that was back in the 1970s.

I guess & hope the above examples are outliers in an otherwise decently functioning system, but then there is copyright. IIRC, seeds have been copyrighted since the 1920s here in the US. That seems pretty strange to me. I'm not sure where patent & copyright diverge, either. Patent a gene, but copyright a seed? Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like a mess.

A very good book making a logical argument against intellectual property is Against Intellectual Property by N. Stephan Kinsella. Warning, though: it is not an easy book as it makes some very logical arguments that require a legal mind to follow.

This book demonstrates how the patent system did more to harm technological creativity than to help it. After reading this book, you can see how inventors spend more of their time protecting their inventions and stopping others from innovating on top of them: Watt's Perfect Engine by Ben Marsden.

That book is a straight-up biography of James Watt and doesn't really make any moral or practical arguments for or against patents, but this article does a good job elucidating it: https://mises.org/library/james-watt-.... It is an excerpt of Against Intellectual Monopoly.

That was a really interesting look at Watt, Joel. Thank you. I hadn't known any of that. I don't think I'll read the IP book. I don't do legalese well at all & I think I get the point. It's a thorny question.