India and the Patent Wars by Murphy Halliburton

Author:Murphy Halliburton [Halliburton, Murphy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Asia, India & South Asia, Business & Economics, Industries, Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology
ISBN: 9781501713989
Google: qs46DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-11-15T04:27:48+00:00

Pursuing the Big Pharma Perspective

Because of the difficulty I encountered in attempting to meet with employees of pharmaceutical companies, I decided to follow Hugh Gusterson’s (1997) suggestions for “polymorphous engagement” around the periphery of powerful, inaccessible institutions. This is an approach Gusterson developed in his ethnographic study of nuclear weapons scientists whose work was secret and whose laboratories he could not visit. He had to operate around these restrictions, meeting scientists in community settings and through other indirect engagements such as visiting the churches they attended and using media sources to supplement his work. My methods of attempting to get the pharmaceutical companies’ perspectives on patent controversies involved tracking corporate actions in the media, doing content analysis of their self-presentations on the Internet, visiting their corporate offices to see what I could glean from the publically accessible areas, and speaking to representatives of companies’ international access programs. I had decided, as a polymorphous engagement strategy, not to directly ask, say, a company lawyer about his or her position on patents, as I anticipated it would be hard to get access to such individuals and the topic might be too sensitive to speak about in any form other than a well-vetted press release. Instead, I choose to contact people in corporate philanthropic or social responsibility programs and ask how they balance their defense of patent rights and issues of access to essential medicines for the underserved, a problem I figured they must have reflected on. I also spoke to representatives of pharmaceutical companies in India that had direct business relations with United States–based companies.

The difficulty of deciphering the new patent system for ayurvedic practitioners stems from the unpredictable effects of the coming together of patent law, ayurvedic medicine, and the global political economy. For those concerned about access to biomedical products, the difficulty in assessing the new system stems partly from pharmaceutical companies’ desire not to be studied and to control the message they give to the public.

The medical anthropologists Whyte, Van der Geest, and Hardon (2002) discuss Maarten Bode’s research on the ayurvedic and unani pharmaceutical industries in India and remark on the apparent ease with which Bode was able to meet manufacturers. They conclude: “Probably the Indian [ayurvedic] companies hoped to gain recognition by allowing a researcher on their premises.” They then add that “for the same reason [concern about their reputation] ‘Western’ producers of pharmaceuticals have done the opposite and closed their doors to social scientists. They have—to the best of our knowledge—never allowed anthropologists to study their companies” (136).

Having worked with both ayurvedic and biomedical producers, I concur in this observation, although I was able to make inroads into directly studying biomedical pharmaceutical companies. Since Whyte, Van der Geest, and Hardon made this point in 2002, direct contact with pharmaceutical companies by social scientists is still rare. There is burgeoning interest in the social analysis of the use of pharmaceuticals. Such research, which has been conducted in various parts of the world, including North America, West Africa,

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