A Reader on Reading

In South Africa today there are millions people infected with the HIV virus, close to 10 percent of the population, perhaps the highest percentage in the world. They cannot be treated, purely for economic reasons. A year of AIDS drugs for one person costs, in Europe or North America, between twenty and thirty thousand American dollars. This in Africa (and in most of Asia and in South America) is far beyond a common mortal’s dreams. Local pharmaceutical companies, however, have managed to produce generic drugs (that is to say, the same drugs as their costly European and American counterparts without the designer labels) at a tiny fraction of the price, about four hundred dollars for a year’s treatment. In answer to this, the largest of all pharmaceutical companies, GlaxoSmithKline (born from the fusion of two British giants, Glaxo-Wellcome and SmithKline-Beecham), solemnly declared that “the patent system must be maintained at all costs.” At all costs.

It will be said that without the monetary investment of these companies, scientific research would be impossible. To allow for new discoveries, those with the money must be coaxed into investing in research and, in order to get people with money to invest in anything, they must be convinced that their money will make a profit. Not just a profit, but a large profit. And a guaranteed profit. And what greater guarantee can be found on this earth than sickness leading unto death, and the human desire to overcome it? Therefore the temptation for setting up a pharmaceutical company in our time is clearly strong. The motives behind such companies are not what one would call philanthropic: the call for healing is not foremost in their mandate. There is an illumination in the sixteenth-century French manuscript Chants royaux du Puy de Rouen that depicts Christ as an apothecary, dispensing (at cost, I’m sure) the drugs of eternal life to Adam and Eve. I do not believe that this image is known to the trustees of GlaxoSmithKline.

A few years later, because of international pressure, thirty-nine of the biggest companies dropped their suit in South Africa. The protests and letter campaigns of Doctors Without Borders and other organizations created what one of the pharmaceutical companies called “exceedingly adverse publicity;” carefully balancing profit gained from usury and profit lost from a tainted image, the advertisement-savvy companies chose to negotiate. However, the question of the legitimacy of these gargantuan profits remains unanswered.

How can we (I mean our societies) tempt these companies into investing in scientific research without giving them in exchange the lives of millions of human beings? I leave the practical problem of funds, trusts, rates, and taxes to faith-healing economists, and choose to concentrate instead on the other factor in this equation: the moral context which allows these practices to thrive.

Is it possible for a society to pose convincingly such moral imperatives while addressing effectively the practical demands of the scientific industry? Is it possible for a society to consider, at the same time, the urgencies of science and the context within which that science develops? “Erst kommt das Fressen, dan kommt die Moral,” sniggered Bertolt Brecht some time ago. “First comes the fodder, then the morals.” Is it possible for a society to lend equal importance to both morals and fodder, to the ethos and the business of a society simultaneously? This ancient question keeps cropping up, again and again, in all ages and under all skies. It was asked when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia for the sake of fair winds that would allow the Greeks to sail to Troy. It was illustrated by George Bernard Shaw in Major Barbara. It was imagined by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein and by H. G. Wells in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Its true essence was put into a story by Oscar Wilde, when the Young King, who refuses to be crowned in jewels crafted by suffering, asks whether the rich man and the poor man are not brothers and receives the answer, “Aye, and the name of the rich brother is Cain.”