Case Writing Project on Histories of Medical Advances Launched

In August 2014, we (Amar Bhidé, Srikant Datar and Katherine McCaffrey, with the generous  support of David Roux) started a project to compile and analyze detailed case histories of the 100 most significant medical innovations in the last quarter of the 20th century. Our project has both practical and scholarly goals: Growing expenditures on medical research and health care without commensurate benefits are now regarded as a serious issue. The problem has been traced to several causes. These include scientific norms that discourage replication of results and encourage publication of ambiguous findings; intellectual property, regulatory and reimbursement regimes that encourage low-risk and low impact commercial development ; and, the possibility that much of the low hanging fruit from earlier scientific breakthroughs (such as the disease theory and the discovery of antibiotics) has already been harvested whereas the benefits of recent breakthroughs (for instance in genomics) are yet to come. Read more>>

Medical Advances Blog

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