Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 206-209. (Budapest, 2009)

KISEBB KÖZLEMÉNYEK —COMMUNICATIONS - Székely, József I.: Szabálytalan gyászbeszéd az utolsó szocialista gyógyszerkutató mammutvállalat (a Gyógyszerkutató Intézet, a korábbi Gyógyszeripari Kutató Intézet) kimúlása alkalmából

220 Comm. de //ist. Artis Med. 206- 209 (2009) "raison d'étre" was well hidden from the Outsiders as a lady covers up the eventual imperfections of her body from the prying eyes of unauthorized people. Well, the IDR was a "stalinist" institution established in 1950. The basic principle was to let the faetories concentrate on manufacturing and to commission separate research institutions to deal with innovation. Practically every branch of the industry (and agriculture for that matter) had a centralized research institute. Thus manufacturing and technical innovation were organically separated from each other. It was a typical case of sterile, formal, bureaucratic logic characterizing the command economies in generál. Nevertheless, this crazy idea proved to be quite successful in the case of IDR at the beginning. Its task was to develop new technologies and patents for the pharmaceutical industry in a devastated country which was bled to white by its "ally" the Nazi Germany, pilfered by its Soviet "liberators" and bombed to pulp by its Anglo-Saxon "friends". The post world war decades meant the period of nuclear arms race but simultaneously it was the golden age of drug research when the first really potent antibiotics, antihypertensive, vasodilating, cytostatic, antipsychotic, anxiolytic and antidepressant drugs were developed. Most of these new drugs were developed in Western countries but of course even the patients who happened to be born in the Eastern half of Europe also wanted to enjoy the blessings of the new medications. Let us add here that according to our geographic concepts Hungary is located not in the "East" but in Central Europe together with Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, etc. However, simplistic political concepts have apparently changed even geography. E.g. in the cold war period Prague was considered an Eastern capital, whereas Vienna a Western city though the former lies to the West of the later one. The main point is that there was practically no trade between the two blocks and of course the communist states did not have the resources to pay for the expensive new medicines. Adept, talented chemists quickly found the solution: develop new manufacturing procedures for their production and license not the molecules themselves but the technology of their industrial production. Actually at least one in each therapeutic or chemical category of the original compounds developed in the West became sooner or later available in Hungary too. Namely until the end of the communist regime it was legal. Therefore, according to the "socialist law" it was not patent piracy only development of "reproduction patents". Euphemism of course, but the Western drug companies did not mind it until some resourceful pharmaceutical companies started exporting their products "back" to countries where they were originally developed. Reading this report young people may ask: "weren't you actually thieves who stole other researchers' intellectual properties? Did not you have morál qualms?" Not, if we put the events into historic perspectives. In the middle of the last Century the world or at least Europe consisted of two antagonistic blocks. It was the age of cold war, nuclear arms race and fierce competition in every branch of economy. A new world war was looming. There were practically no economic ties between the free world and communist block. Even worse was that the western countries put their technologically advanced commodities on the so called "Cocom" list, its items were not allowed to be sold to the less developed communists countries. In this hostile atmosphere both rivals collected as much technological information from the other side as they could. When a country arms itself against another one it will obviously not honour the other's intellectual property rights. And this routine was mutual. The rivals obviously carefully studied and copied each other's armaments. Surely the com-