Archive | January, 2013

Morality in pharmaceutical regulation

29 Jan
There’s been a lot of questions recently about NICE’s approval procedures for new drugs. My own familiarity with the process is only related to the ethics committees’ role, so I wouldn’t try to offer any kind of solution- let’s face it theres going to be enough of those thrown out half-cocked in the coming months. What I do want to talk about, though, is the morals which underly the process, or at least that should. Normally, I’d rail against the idea that societal morality makes sense, but here, it really serves a purpose.
 

Moral criticisms often get thrown at big pharma, for reasons I don’t really need to go through here. The same can be said for the regulatory procedures governing what drugs make it to market, and who gets them. Things aren’t necessarily so simple as is often made out, though- it just doesn’t come down to blindly following rules and disregarding compassion, as so many commenters blithely shout. So, what I’m gonna do is attempt to demonstrate that while both policy and morality are essential for regulating pharmaceuticals, the latter is determinative of the fundamental nature of regulation; and that without morals it would be impossible to interpret standards set to maintain successful governance of the industry. Big talk, for sure.

Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Yeah, so about that hiatus…

28 Jan

Alright, here it is.

 

I’d like to apologise, as I have mentioned several times on twitter, for the sheer lack of activity on Biojammer since December.

Scawled notes like this, in which the baby actually represents dudes with robot eyes. Maybe.

Scawled notes like this, in which the baby actually represents dudes with robot eyes. Maybe.

All I can say, really, is that it has been a very busy time, in which researching articles and then translating my fevered scrawlings into legible and coherent prose just hasn’t really been feasible.

Which, I’m aware, sounds like a big ol’ excuse. And perhaps it is, to be honest.  The holiday season was upon us, and then I found myself, all of a sudden, with a whole lot of deadlines looming. I was given some exceedingly kind advice by members of SIBLE to rejig a paper and then try submitting it to a particular journal, who will for now remain nameless (because their submission process and referencing style guide was, to say the least, perplexing). That was a much longer process than it probably warranted, but how great would it be to get published?

I have also, in the last quarter of an hour, finally completed the process for submitting my PhD proposal in totality. Twitterites may have followed this saga over the last few weeks, but that too has been something of a labour, due to a series of misunderstandings and miscommunications.

I smell a sitcom!!

Still it’s done now, and in the lap of the gods. I had a meeting with a professor who was very encouraging, so let’s hope that it all works out and I can convince some rube wonderful organisation blessed with incisive foresight to throw me a grant. There have also been a variety of other projects I’ve been doing work for, some of which you might hear more about here soon; and some of which are moneymaking schemes, because I’m an impoverished wannabe academic and also I always wanted to swim in cash like Scrooge McDuck.

So, in short, it has been frantic times at Biojammer labs, and I sincerely apologise to the few of you who come here for my prattling. I genuinely appreciate every reader, and I always like having a banter about whatever gibberish I’m currently spouting. I’m just putting together something on morality and pharmaceuticals, which as it happens is mildly topical. Biojammer.com: your source for tangentially relevant polemics. Other than the Daily Mail, that is.

New post within the next 24 hours, I promise, and many more to come. I currently no longer have institutional access as the University of Sheffield has finally managed to shake me off its books, so the dense post style may have to change to accommodate my altered research circumstances, but I have one or two ideas I can work on for the moment.

Stay groovy.

Tags: , , , ,