Medical and economic sociologist Professor Donald Light visited the LSE in May, to talk about the crisis of unaffordably high prices for cancer and other specialty medicines and describe a potential alternative for developing better medicines at lower costs.
Professor Light discussed the role of patents in drug development, the high price of R&D, and questioned compromised funding sources. He then set out the public health model for drug development used by the Mario Negri Institute and described in Light's new book Good Pharma.
Discussant Professor Alistair McGuire responded with his own thoughts on Light's thesis.
Download the podcast of the event
[Note that the talk starts approx. 10 minutes into the recording]
Download Professor Donald Light’s Presentation
Download Professor Alistair McGuire’s Response
This public event took place at the LSE on Monday 16 June 2016.
Key note
Professor Donald Light is a medical and economic sociologist who does policy research on institutional and global bioethics concerning access and quality problems for medical services or drugs.
Recent research analyses the epidemic of harmful side effects from drugs (The Risks of Prescription Drugs Columbia Univ Press 2010), institutional barriers to more effective, safer drugs, and global vaccine policy. Light's new book, based on his time at Harvard University at its Safra Center for Ethics, is Good Parma: the Public Health Model of the Mario Negri Institute (Palgrave 2015).
Light has been a visiting fellow or professor at the universities of Oxford, Manchester, Maastricht, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford. In 2016, he won the Pellegrino Medal in bioethics and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge.
Respondent
Professor Alistair McGuire is Professor in Health Economics within the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and is Chair of LSE Health.
Chair
Professor Elias Mossialos is Brian Abel-Smith Professor of Health Policy within the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and Director of LSE Health.