A trenchant study of the dangers of turning medical knowledge into private intellectual property.
A freelance journalist faults the “fundamentally corrupt and unjust system” that allows big pharma and others to hoard scientific knowledge instead of using it for the greatest public good.
Zaitchik offers a biting study of the “double protection racket” through which drug companies benefit from government-subsidized research and then use patents to reap unseemly profits from it. Beginning with the Renaissance princes whose “royal grants” amounted to proto-patents, the author gives a dense but clear history of how scientific patents have promoted “monopoly medicine.” Zaitchik argues that patents were envisioned by the framers of the Constitution as a two-way social contract for advancing science and “useful arts” but have become a vehicle for turning vital medical knowledge into private intellectual property. That process sped up with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed businesses and universities to retain the rights to knowledge developed with federal funding, and it helped to make possible the “vaccine nationalism” of Operation Warp Speed. Drawing on deep research, Zaitchik knocks the halos off three prominent players in the pandemic: Pfizer (whose CEO fought generic drugs in the 1980s); Moderna (two of whose executives dumped $30 million in stock in a legal but suspiciously timed move after the company announced promising vaccine trial results); and Bill Gates, the focus of a chapter called “Pharma’s Best Friend: Bill Gates and Covid-19.” The author makes a strong case that Gates tried to undermine the efforts of experts who predicted a global vaccine supply crisis with his insistence that market forces could ensure a fair distribution of vaccines among rich and poor nations, a view that has proved “catastrophically incorrect” given that half the world’s population remains unvaccinated against Covid. While big pharma often gets the sole blame for soaring drug prices, this book is a brave and timely reminder that politicians and corporate titans have enabled its excesses.
A trenchant study of the dangers of turning medical knowledge into private intellectual property.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64009-506-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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