ABSTRACT
Pharmaceutical research and development is big business. In 1995, the global industry spent about $34 billion on the discovery and development of new medicines. US firms alone spent $14.4 billion on research and development (R&D) that year, and by 1996 the figure was nearly $15.8 billion. Over the past fifty years, investment in R&D has given good returns, both for the companies involved and for society. This has been particularly true for US pharmaceutical companies which have introduced about three-fifths of all of the new drugs approved for therapeutic use around the world. In the process, healthcare professionals have acquired many new weapons to prevent or fight diseases, ranging from infections and cancer to congestive heart failure and influenza. This is one of the success stories of twentieth-century science and technology. However, scholars know more about eighteenth-century drug jars than they do about the relations between industry, academic research, and government that have led to most of these innovations.
