Dear Professor Veronesi, in today's number 6, I read your opinion on my film The medicine seller (which I don't know how you saw, since it was being released in theaters at the end of April). You define it as "not credible except as satire", "exaggerated" and therefore "insignificant". The story we have told does not seem exaggerated to me, just today as we read the Roche-Novartis scandal in the newspapers. Do you want to deny that scientific representatives too often offer services, prebends, complacent offers to doctors and hospitals in order to promote their product, good or bad? You say that exaggerating doesn't solve anything. In my opinion, there are those who have the task of denouncing and those who have the task of solving. We, with our work, draw attention to a serious problem whose existence is indisputable. Solving the problems of pharmaceutical research will instead be the duty of those who have the power to make decisions in this field. This too is, and was, the task of a politician and a minister. Turning a blind eye to malfeasance is never good medicine. Cordially.
Best regards
Antonio Morabito
He answers: Umberto Veronesi, scientific director of the European Institute of Oncology, Milan
Dear Morabito, I really appreciate the cinema of denunciation, and I wouldn't want you to be left with the false impression of my "collateralism" with the pharmaceutical industry. I am so convinced of the need for independent scientific research that I have structured the Foundation that bears my name on the financing of innovative projects. In fact, I think that subjecting research to pure and simple economic objectives is a serious mistake. Not only an ethical error, but a methodological one, because it is almost certain that, in the course of research aimed at obtaining a market-sized drug, potentialities are neglected (because they are longer and less promising) and thus remain latent. On the other hand, it is hard to think that we can do without the research conducted by the private pharmaceutical industry: in a modern economy, it is a task that cannot be undertaken by the State, and that the University does not have the economic means and the structures to deal with. Inevitably, the pharmaceutical industry's research is profit-driven. If it is unrealistic to be scandalized by it, it is instead right to denounce the improprieties and abuses of a "wild" liberalism, which should be controlled more rigorously. Rigorous control is a powerful weapon, capable of preventing or at least limiting the malpractice you denounce. Courageous denunciation, which I have never intended to define as insignificant, believe me.
April 21, 2014
