The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself - And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future.
by Harriet A. Washington
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Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2011
448 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
Think your body is your own to control and dispose of as you wish? Think again. The U.S. Patent Office has either granted patents, or has them pending, on more than 500,000 genes or DNA sequences controlling the most basic processes of human life. If you undergo surgery in many hospitals you must sign away ownership rights to your excised tissues, even if they turn out to have medical and fiscal value. Life itself is rapidly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the medical industrial complex.
Deadly Monopolies is a powerful, disturbing, and deeply researched book that illuminates this "life patent" gold rush and its harmful, and even lethal, consequences for public health. It examines the shaky legal, ethical, and social bases for Big Pharma's argument that such patents are necessary to protect their investments in new drugs and treatments, arguing that they instead stifle the research, competition, and innovation that can drive down costs and save lives. In opposing the commodification of the body, Harriet Washington provides a crucial human dimension to an often all-too-abstract debate.
Like the bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Deadly Monopolies reveals in shocking detail just how far the profit motive has encroached in colonizing human life and compromising medical ethics. It is sure to stir debate - and instigate change.
"Starred Review. Searing... A gripping, revelatory account." - Kirkus Reviews
"Doubtless as scary, eye-opening, and well-documented as its predecessor, this is an important book." - Library Journal
"Harriet Washington shines her relentless torch into the darkest corners of Big Pharma with courage, dedication and accuracy." - John le Carré
"Big Pharma is not going to like Deadly Monopolies one bit, but you probably will - especially if, like most Americans, you're finding the co-pay on your drugs too much to handle. Washington correctly reminds us that, as hard as high drug costs are in the USA, they are lethal for the world's poor. Brava Harriet Washington!" - Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and author of I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks
"Harriet Washington has written an important and compelling book. She shows how recent changes in patent law have caused drug prices to soar, while reducing innovation by drug companies to near-zero. Well-documented, yet highly readable, the book paints a vivid picture of an industry that now exploits monopoly rights to patients' genes, and relies on taxpayer-funded NIH research for its few novel and important drugs - even as it turns out an endless stream of trivial variations of top-selling old drugs." - Marcia Angell, M.D., author of The Truth About the Drug Companies and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine
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in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Harriet A. Washington is the author of Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2007 PEN Oakland Award, and the 2007 American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. She has been a fellow in medical ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University.
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