How The FDA is Killing Molecular Medicine: Q/A w Peter Huber

Nick Gillespie | 11.29.2013 11:48 AM

When the FDA is shutting down personal genetic services such as 23andMe, it's blocking the next great era in medical innovation.

Click above to hear Peter Huber talk about his new book, The Cure in the Code, and what needs to happen to create truly personalized drugs.

Originally released on November 20, 2013. Here's the full writeup:

"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than an outrage, argues Huber, that innovation is being blocked by the Federal Drug Administration, which clings to an outdated one-size-fits-all drug approval model.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.

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