FDA vs Modern Medicine: Q/A w Peter Huber

“The search for one-dimensional, very simple correlations – one
drug, one clinical effect in all patients – is horrendously
obsolete,” says Peter
Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the
author, most recently, of
The Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law is Undermining 21st
Century Medicine.

Pharmaceuticals, Huber says, offer amazing and important ways of
improving our health and quality of life and today’s scientists and
doctors have the ability to tailor drugs to patients’ unique
genetic codes. It’s nothing less than an outrage, argues Huber,
that innovation is being blocked by the Federal Drug
Administration, which clings to an outdated one-size-fits-all drug
approval model.

Huber sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to discuss the
future of “molecular medicine,” the FDA drug-approval process, and
how AIDS activism in the 1980s and ’90s provides a model for
disrupting the government’s refusal to allow experimentation and
innovation.

About 10 minutes.

For more of Reason‘s coverage on the FDA,
go here.

Camera by Jim Epstein and Anthony Fisher. Edited by Joshua
Swain.

Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube
Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes
live.

View this article.