Collaboration in the Pharmaceutical Industry by Viviane Quirke

Author:Viviane Quirke [Quirke, Viviane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Modern, 20th Century, Medical, Pharmacy
ISBN: 9781134390984
Google: LZ82JpTKyOcC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-10-12T01:16:29+00:00

5. Clinicians as Collaborators for Industry

Rhône-Poulenc’s post-war network of clinical researchers included Bernard Halpern, after he had joined Pasteur Vallery-Radot’s department at the Hôpital Broussais.127 Pasteur Vallery-Radot himself, whose laboratory (the ‘Clinique médicale propédeutique’), received their support at the rate of 150,000 FF per semester in 1957, became member of the group’s administrative council in 1961. Also in Paris, there was Marcel Bessis, who worked at the Centre National de Transfusion Sanguine in the rue Cabanel — an outgrowth of the centre for penicillin production after World War Two. Bessis believed collaboration with industry to be a natural consequence of the reform of medical education in France, and became a consultant for Rhône-Poulenc in 1954.128 The firm kept him on its books because of his scientific pre-eminence, and as a hedge for the future (‘just in case…’).

In the provinces, Rhône-Poulenc funded Reilly’s laboratory, which received 400,000 FF in 1957,129 and Loubatières, Professor of Applied Physiology at Montpellier, who had discovered the hypoglycaemic effect of sulphonamides in 1942 (see Chapter 4). This marked the beginning of his long association with the group, but he did not become a paid collaborator until 1946, when he was offered 30,000 FF per month to help the firm develop off-the-label uses for existing drugs.130 In the 1950s, Loubatières also collaborated with the Laboratoires Servier, and was probably at the origin of the firm’s success with Glucidoral, the first hypoglycaemic sulpha-drug to be launched in France.131 Finally there was Henri Laborit, whom I will return to later.

The growth of medical research after World War Two is a phenomenon shared by a large part of the Western world.132 Thereafter the two categories of science and medicine became more difficult to distinguish from each other; hence the term ‘biomedicine’ or ‘biomedical’ that emerged in the 1960s.133 However, in France, it had particular significance. The project to modernize French medicine by making it scientific was closely associated with the post-war reconstruction of French society. Instrumental to this was the new generation of French clinicians, which between the 1940s and 1950s came to the fore, many of them quadragenarians who had benefited from Rockefeller support in the 1930s,134 had joined the Resistance during the war, and emerged from it in positions of political and professional power. They were also assisted and inspired by the reform of medical education, conceived in 1945 by Robert Debré, and realized under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle in 1958.135

In addition to this newly found political power at the hands of charismatic leaders, clinicians were able to exploit the niches created by new drugs, in particular antibiotics. The defeat inflicted on infectious diseases allowed them to turn to chronic illnesses such as allergies and diseases of the cardio-vascular system as their prime object of study. As well as opening up new avenues for research, drugs presented them with new tools with which to carry out their investigations and test their hypotheses. By adopting drugs as well as research as a central element in the study

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