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Dutfield, Graham --- "From Traditional Medicines to Modern Drugs" [2012] ELECD 327; in Bubela, Tania; Gold, Richard E. (eds), "Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge

Editor(s): Bubela, Tania; Gold, Richard E.

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848442238

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: From Traditional Medicines to Modern Drugs

Author(s): Dutfield, Graham

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

4. From traditional medicines to modern
drugs
Graham Dutfield
If you devise something new and useful, it does not matter if you explain it all by
phlogiston theory or have no explanation at all. All that matters is that it works.1
(Lord Justice Jacob)



INTRODUCTION

Recent decades have seen some intense debates concerning the alleged whole-
sale misappropriation of traditional knowledge by the pharmaceutical indus-
try. To some people, this industry almost literally preys on indigenous peoples,
patenting their knowledge and making billions of dollars without sharing a
cent with them. Many from the industry counter that scientific and technolog-
ical advances make traditional knowledge irrelevant in drug discovery, and
bioprospecting a waste of time and money: it may have been important in the
past, but that does not make it important today or tomorrow. Both views, that
traditional knowledge substantially subsidizes the pharmaceutical industry,
and that traditional knowledge has no relevance for present and future drug
discovery, are incorrect. The traditional knowledge champions tend to rely too
much on their analysis of a small number of high profile cases. As for the
detractors, the error may arise from adhering to a conveniently simple but
inaccurate assumption that pharmaceutical research and development invari-
ably follows a purely linear unidirectional pathway starting with a single
discovery followed 10­15 years later, if at all, by a product. In the paradoxi-
cal real world, progress in pharmaceutical research goes backwards as well as
forwards and along winding complicated pathways often with ...