The Age of Cures: Barry Werth on How Big Pharma Once Saved Your Life

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. Earlier this week, we did a show with a very successful AI researcher, entrepreneur and writer, Richard Socher. He's the CEO of Recursive, a $4 billion AI startup, and he's also the author of an intriguing new book, The Eureka Machine. It's out this week in which he suggests that we're on the verge of what he calls a new scientific renaissance which will cure everything, especially all our medical problems, all our woes, all the great diseases. We even talked about the idea of AI coming up with a cure for cancer. It's taken for granted, of course, that maybe in historical terms, science didn't do such a great job curing everything. My guest today, however, might strongly disagree. Barry Werth is a very distinguished writer on science, a historian of technology, the author of eight books, including his 1995 book, The Billion-Dollar Molecule, the 2014 follow-up, The Antidote Inside the World of New Pharma, and his book, which is out this week, a new book, the third in the trilogy, The Age of Cures, How American Scientists Saved Your Life. Barry is joining us from Northampton, Massachusetts. Barry, congratulations on the new book. Why do we tend, in broad terms, to be a little cynical about technology and our health industry, Barry? Why do we need writers like you to remind us that once upon a time, pharma was a remarkable industry, maybe even a miraculous one?

Barry Werth (2:32)

Thanks for having me on. The short answer is we have very short memories. We take things for granted, and we don't remember that as recently as 80 or 90 years ago, there were almost no drugs for any diseases.

There were natural substances that had been discovered over the eons. There were drugs and there were many, many people who had a variety of diseases, but there was no established way for finding new medicines. That all began to change in the early part of the 20th century. A German biochemist, Ehrlich, postulated that chemicals could be used to treat diseases. But then it was another 20 years before the sulfur drugs, really the first indication that that might be a prophecy that might come true.

Andrew Keen (3:32)

Lead me through the trilogy, as I said, and all these books have been very well received.

You wrote in 1995, The Billion-Dollar Molecule, then you followed up with The Antidote. Today, you've got The Age of Cures.

How do these fit together? Why are they a trilogy? What story are you telling?

Barry Werth (3:53)

In 1988, during the AIDS crisis, when there were no medicines and people were, if they were diagnosed with HIV, were bound to die, I started writing about the business of biomedical research. I followed a couple of people at Harvard who had moved into the poll position for finding a cure. And David Baltimore, the Nobel Laureate and eventually head of Rockefeller Institute, proposed at that time a Manhattan Project for AIDS. That is, the best scientists in the country pull together and in the sense of responding to a national need, share, cooperate in a federally funded, federally directed program and try to establish a crash program for curing AIDS.

I was shocked to discover that no one was interested. I didn't really understand why I became consumed with this question of, how does this system work and why is it so resistant to an idea like that? In 1989, I got inside of small startup drug company, Vertex Pharmaceuticals. They had just gotten their venture financing, there were five or six scientists, they could all fit in the founders' Volvo wagon. I followed them for a couple of years and I wrote The Billion-Dollar Molecule. It was really just them trying to get this little engine off the ground. They did spectacularly and during that time they went public, they became leaders in the number of scientific areas. I thought I was done. I went on wrote a couple of other books and then in 2012, right before they were about to, this is almost 20 years later, launch their first two blockbuster drugs, I got back inside the company. The founder warned me that they probably wouldn't let me inside, but I navigated away and I wrote The Antidote, which was about the launch of two drugs, one for hepatitis C, which was the fastest launch in history, and then the other, much more historically important, was their first cystic fibrosis drug. Versix is now known as the company that cured cystic fibrosis. It has a very robust scientific pipeline. They've cured a number of other diseases. There are other approvals pending.