I heard a very interesting interview with the inventor of the first contraceptive pill on Radio 4 the other day (I think the 50th anniversary is coming up), and he said the contraceptive pill had a window of 11 years to be invented and marketed, as changing social pressures and medical priorities would have meant it wouldn't have been pushed either earlier or later.

I wondered what people thought of that, first of all, and, second, whether there were any other drugs/drug classes that wouldn't have made it if they had been invented at a different time. Maybe statins, for example?

Posted 9th November 2010, 15:41:17

Viagra? Still a tough subject for many men even now, but you can imagine it would have been even harder to talk about this disease area 30 to 40 years ago.

Posted 23rd November 2010, 15:23:46

Statins? I love this question! Surely statins are quite a bit 'of their time' actually too, I think you're rigt. And maybe a universal polypill containing statins in the future will be almost as much about the changes of the times as about a long battle against some age-old disease to be cured...

Hey, how much of medicine will be recognisable in generations ahead anyway? It's only a hundred years old as it is!

Posted 23rd November 2010, 15:30:24

Oh, while you've got me feeling philosophical, LL, every child is a child of its time :-) Sorry, that's not so much philosophical as pedantic. But you know, it's right, I think actaully every pill, not just some we could name like statins and lifestyle stuff, every pill will be one of its time eventually.
Hey PILLS will be of their time when another mode of drug delivery outdates them

Posted 1st December 2010, 22:02:00

Well there is something in the fact that when we "cure" one disease we just encourage others to develop.

Eventually, we'll have statins in Burgers to stop us getting heart disease, we'll have cured cancer and we'll all eventually get dementia, so those treatments will be of their time.

Sorry to present a glum view!

Posted 10th January 2011, 11:23:08

Can I present a more optimistic view?

Surely we won't need any medicines before too long. As soon as we get any medical problems we'll just synch up our brain with iTunes and go and buy the latest iBody to put ourselves into!

Posted 31st January 2011, 09:45:48

@Amino LOL Not until there's a better battery life though!