Gaming the Pharma Model

In a great frenzy of activity, researchers showed that a component of red wine appeared to improve longevity and decrease chronic disease in several animal models.  So compelling the evidence, Glaxo Smith Kline paid $720 Million for the company, Sirtris, that did the work. 

Even the Sirtris founders, who were now GSK employees, created an outlet to sell the compound as a nutriceutical (albeit in low doses) and GSK had to force them to give up their on-line company.  It is a great read, all in all, about what can go wrong in the race to find the 'silver bullet' for any disease, much less a host of them.  Not only that, but, in the end resevatrol turns out to be an unlikely candidate for anything, save the emotional interest in pharma producing 'silver bullets.'  But as you know from reading here and everywhere, the wholly non-linear and complex nature of, well, nature, precludes, in general, these kinds of single solutions to complex problems.  Creating health is the outcome of multiple, simultaneous events, most of which we can only 'nudge' in the best direction.  Health, like disease, is a trajectory through time, not a problem in plumbing or simple engineering.  But hope springs eternal.  And apparently, so does money to support the dream.  Like geopolitics, our discourse on health is riven by minute, local activity which, in aggregate seems to point to some underlying logic, principle, or postulate that can be discovered by reducing the problem to some set of simple parts, like a lawn mower engine.  And, no matter how we try, like Leonard Cohen sings, "You can add up the parts, but you won't get the sum."  Why?  'There's a crack, a crack in everything.  But, he reassures us, 'that's how the light gets in'. Listen to it. Anthropologist, I think, are in the business of light, no matter how small the cracks.