The Purple Politics of Life Science Innovation

There has long been a consensus among U.S. policymakers that the reasons the country is so successful in life sciences innovation are, first, that the federal government provides robust funding for scientific research (mostly through the National Institutes of Health), and second, that America encourages vigorous private-sector innovation by providing strong intellectual property protections and a drug reimbursement system that together allow companies to earn enough revenue to reinvest in risky R&D. As a political matter, writes Rob Atkinson in The Hill, support for the U.S. way of discovering and developing new drugs thus has been neither a red-state sort of issue nor a blue-state one. It has been a bipartisan shade of purple. But this once-happy political consensus is now under assault from left-wing populists and right-wing libertarians who, each for their own reasons, object to both the public-private policy framework and the results it produces. Against the backdrop of a vitriolic political campaign year—where purple language of a different sort tends to color policy debates—it is important to take stock of each camp’s arguments and consider what they could portend for future biomedical innovation.