Merck Quotes

As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry

It is the wretched way people have of setting up a claim to happiness that ruins everything in this world. A man will make progress if he can get rid of this claim and desire nothing but what he sees before him .

There is more in the world than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Doctor - or in the Merck Manual.

Merck first distributed the Moraten strain in 1968. Since then, it has been the only measles vaccine used in the United States. Between 1968 and 2006, hundreds of millions of doses have been given. As a result, the number of people infected every year with measles in the United States has decreased from four million to fewer than fifty. Worldwide, the number of people killed by measles every year has decreased from eight million to about five hundred thousand. Measles vaccines save more than seven million lives a year. And the descendants of Kimber Farms’s original flock of chickens, still maintained on the grounds of Merck, are used to make vaccines today.

CDC cited Merck’s and Gates’s cheery assessments of the grotesque Indian experiments to help justify its expanded recommendation for the Gardasil vaccine. Prior to COVID-19, Gardasil was the most dangerous vaccine ever licensed, accounting for some 22 percent of cumulative injuries from all adverse events reported to the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). During clinical trials, Merck was unable to show that Gardasil was effective against cervical cancers.173 Instead, the studies showed the vaccine actually increases cervical cancer by 46.3 percent in women exposed to HPV prior to vaccination—perhaps one-third of all women.174 According to Merck’s clinical trial reports, the

Pharmaceutical companies became very interested in using siRNAs as potential new drugs. Theoretically, siRNA molecules could be used to knock down expression of any protein that was believed to be harmful in a disease. In the same year that Fire and Mello were awarded their Nobel Prize, the giant pharmaceutical company Merck paid over one billion US dollars for a siRNA company in California called Sirna Therapeutics. Other large pharmaceutical companies have also invested heavily. But in 2010 a bit of a chill breeze began to drift through the pharmaceutical industry. Roche, the giant Swiss company, announced that it was stopping its siRNA programmes, despite having spent more than $500 million on them over three years. Its neighbouring Swiss corporation, Novartis, pulled out of a collaboration with a siRNA company called Alnylam in Massachusetts. There are still plenty of other companies who have stayed in this particular game, but it would probably be fair to say there’s a bit more nervousness around this technology than in the past. One of the major problems with using this kind of approach therapeutically may sound rather mundane. Nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, are just difficult to turn into good drugs. Most good existing drugs – ibuprofen, Viagra, anti-histamines – have certain characteristics in common. You can swallow them, they get across your gut wall, they get distributed around your body, they don’t get destroyed too quickly by your liver, they get taken up by cells, and they work their effects on the molecules in or on the cells. Those all sound like really simple things, but they’re often the most difficult things to get right when developing a new drug. Companies will spend tens of millions of dollars – at least – getting this bit right, and it is still a surprisingly hit-and-miss process. It’s so much worse when trying to create drugs around nucleic acids. This is partly because of their size. An average siRNA molecule is over 50 times larger than a drug like ibuprofen. When creating drugs (especially ones to be taken orally rather than injected) the general rule is, the smaller the better. The larger a drug is, the greater the problems with getting high enough doses into patients, and keeping them in the body for long enough. This may be why a company like Roche has decided it can spend its money more effectively elsewhere. This doesn’t mean that siRNA won’t ever work in the treatment of illnesses, it’s just quite high risk as a business venture.

Without the prospect of profits in the rare case of success, companies could never justify exploring a new idea. As Merck’s current CEO, Kenneth Frazier, points out: ‘The price of [a] successful drug is paying for the 90%-plus projects that fail. We can’t have winners if we can’t pay for losers.

Merck, the $200 billion, New Jersey–based pharmaceutical giant, was hit early on the morning of NotPetya’s judgment day. It lost fifteen thousand Windows computers in ninety seconds,

Gates’s strong patronage of HPV vaccines (Gardasil and Cervarix) deepened suspicions that he was weaponizing vaccination against human fertility. Merck’s clinical trials showed strong signals for reproductive harm from Gardasil.177, 178 People in the study suffered reproductive problems including premature ovarian failure at ten times background rates. Female fertility has dropped precipitously beginning in 2006 in the United States, coterminous with Gardasil uptake.179, 180 Historical drops in fecundity have occurred in every nation with high Gardasil uptake.181

Merck was ivermectin’s original manufacturer and had formerly boasted of ivermectin as its “wonder drug.

In 2016, Merck distributed 900 million doses in Africa alone. “The drug is safe and has minor side effects,” a Merck spokesman said at the time.

Demonizing IVM as a “horse drug” was, of course, ironic, given that NIAID initially developed Merck’s replacement therapy, molnupiravir, as a horse drug. Furthermore, calling ivermectin a horse drug is like calling antibiotics a horse drug. Many long-established basic drugs are, of course, effective in all mammals because they work on our shared biology.

like, Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Biontech, Sinovac, Novavax, CureVac, Johson & Johnson, Merck & Co, Inovio, and Cansino Biologics all use the same toxic and D.N.A. altering ingredients will absolutely make a killing!

Ivermectin, a drug Merck had developed to treat parasitic infections in livestock, might also cure onchocerciasis in humans.

In 1987, ivermectin was approved for human use under the brand name Mectizan. But there was one final challenge – money. It would cost Merck $2 million to set up a distribution channel to West Africa and an extra $20 million per year to produce it, even ignoring the millions that Merck had already spent on development. The West Africans suffering from river blindness were some of the poorest people in the world.

Roy Vagelos, Merck’s CEO at the time, asked the WHO to fund Mectizan, but the answer was no. He pleaded with the US Agency for International Development and the US Department of State. Still no. That’s why Roy urgently needed money. Roy then went to one final, and radical, source of funding – Merck itself. On 21 October 1987, Roy announced that Merck would give Mectizan away for free, ‘as much as needed, for as long as needed’, to anyone anywhere in the world who needed it. Merck established the Mectizan Donation Program (MDP), which brought together the WHO, the World Bank, UNICEF, dozens of Ministries of Health and over 30 non-governmental organisations to oversee and fund the distribution of Mectizan.

The decision to donate Mectizan grew the pie. Initially, most of the increase went to West African and Latin American countries, communities and citizens. But Merck subsequently benefited as well, even though such benefits weren’t the primary reason for Merck’s decision. The MDP boosted Merck’s reputation as a highly responsible enterprise. In January 1988, Business Week described Merck as one of ‘the best in public service’ and called the MDP ‘an unusual humanitarian gesture’. Fortune named Merck America’s most admired company for seven years in a row between 1987 and 1993, a record never equalled before or since. This reputation for serving society in turn attracted both investors and stakeholders.

he did receive numerous letters from colleagues saying they’d joined Merck because of the MDP.

Merck maintained it had not tested either vaccine against an inert placebo in pre-approval trials, so no one could scientifically predict if the vaccines would avert more injuries or cancers than they would cause. Nevertheless, the sister FDA panel, VRBPAC, approved Gardasil—to prevent cervical cancer—without requiring proof that the vaccine prevented any sort of cancer, and despite strong evidence from Merck’s clinical trial that Gardasil could dramatically raise risks of cancer and autoimmunity in some girls.82 ACIP, nevertheless, effectively mandated both jabs. Gardasil would be the most expensive vaccine in history, costing patients $420 for the three-jab series and generating revenues of over $1 billion annually for Merck.83 That year, nine of the thirteen ACIP panel members and their institutions collectively received over $1.6 billion of grant money from NIH and NIAID. Systemic Conflicts of Interest Pharma and Dr. Fauci similarly rig virtually all the critical drug approval panels using this strategy of populating them with PIs who, bound by financial fealty to Pharma and NIAID funders, reliably approve virtually every new drug upon which they deliberate—with or without safety studies. From 1999 to 2000, Government Oversight Committee (GOC) Chairman Republican Congressman Dan Burton investigated the systemic corruption of these panels during two years of intense investigations and hearings. According to Burton, “CDC routinely allows scientists with blatant

Five years earlier, two Merck scientists won the Nobel Prize for developing ivermectin (IVM), a drug with unprecedented firepower against a wide range of human parasites, including roundworm, hookworm, river blindness, and lymphatic filariasis.1 That salute was the Nobel Committee’s only award to an infectious disease medication in 60 years. FDA approved IVM as safe and effective for human use in 1996.

During the early industry offensive against HCQ, one of the drug’s principal manufacturers, Sanofi, suddenly detected “safety concerns” with HCQ that it had never noticed during decades of profitable pre-pandemic production. In a remarkable coincidence, on February 4, 2021, Merck similarly discovered “a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies” regarding IVM.71 Merck was ivermectin’s original manufacturer and had formerly boasted of ivermectin as its “wonder drug.

On June 9, 2021 President Biden dutifully reiterated the US government’s commitment to procure approximately 1.7 million courses of the NIAID-funded drug from Merck.81 BARDA collaborated with a confederacy of other shady Defense Department operatives, including the DoD Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND) and the Army Contracting Command, on the $1.2 billion purchase. Not only was the drug developed with taxpayer money, but its $712 per dose price to the taxpayer is forty times more than Merck’s $17.64 cost of production. Merck, which expects to make $7 billion per year on the new blockbuster, saw its stock price spike on news of the government contract and after President Biden’s televised plug.

Not only was the drug developed with taxpayer money, but its $712 per dose price to the taxpayer is forty times more than Merck’s $17.64 cost of production. Merck, which expects to make $7 billion per year on the new blockbuster, saw its stock price spike on news of the government contract and after President Biden’s televised plug.

Our investment style has been given a name-focus investing-which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The idea that it is hard to find good investments. So concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But ninety-eight percent of the investment world doesn't think this way. It's been good for us-and you-that we've done this.What's funny is that most big investment organizations don't think like this. They hire lots of people, evaluate Merck vs. Pfizer and every stock in the S&P 500, and think they can beat the market. You can't do it.

You know, Merck? The same Merck who kept Vioxx on the market after they KNEW it was killing people? Yeah, THAT Merck! Their lawyers must have worked up a formula to figure out how much liability they could withstand before they started losing money by keeping Vioxx on the market. Turns out the number was 55,000 human deaths they could be

Interestingly, much as the happiest people don’t seek happiness, the wealthiest people are not those who most ruthlessly pursue wealth.101 John Kay cites a number of cases of global giants, household names such as ICI, Boeing, Merck, Pfizer and Citigroup, which were once highly profitable organisations while they focussed on delivering a good product, but which nosedived as soon as the bean-counters took over, and told people to focus on the bottom line – making money. Greed doesn’t pay (although abjuring greed because it pays better to do so is to thwart oneself, since it is the attitude of mind, not a certain action or set of actions, that is both in itself to be desired and goes to create prosperity). Success in business comes, bizarrely enough, as a by-product of running a good business.

Roosevelt authorized creation of the first U.S. agency dedicated to studying biological warfare. From its anodyne name—War Research Service—no one could deduce its mission. Anyone curious, though, could have made an educated guess by noting that its director was the renowned chemist George Merck, president of the pharmaceutical company that bears his family name.

MALONE: Well, on the treatment front, the Merck and Pfizer drugs are really fairly toxic and not particularly effective. That will come out publicly. The deadly nature of remdesivir will become more and more clear. The safety and effectiveness of the early treatment strategies that Drs. Tony Urso, Ryan Cole, and Peter McCullough and everybody have been promoting will become clearer. So it will become clearer that there were unnecessary deaths due to suppression of early treatment. As for the vaccines, because the Pfizer data package will continue to roll out and continue to be nitpicked, you’ll learn more and more about the various malfeasance that’s occurred. There will be increasing awareness of the reproductive risks and the coagulopathy, stroke, blood clotting, autoimmune disease, and this kind of chronic malaise of the post-vaccinated. Those risks will be known to a greater extent. I think that there’ll be increased awareness of the damage to immune systems and the dangerous consequences of that.

The likes of you and I cannot “give” to the federal government, as under the Federal Acquisition Regulations this is considered to be a risk for exerting undue influence. But the CDC has established a nonprofit “CDC Foundation.” According to the CDC’s own website [419]: Established by Congress as an independent, nonprofit organization, the CDC Foundation is the sole entity authorized by Congress to mobilize philanthropic partners and private-sector resources to support CDC’s critical health protection mission. Likewise, the NIH has established the “Foundation for the National Institutes of Health,” currently headed by CEO Dr. Julie Gerberding (formerly CDC director, then president of Merck Vaccines, then chief patient officer and executive vice president, Population Health & Sustainability at Merck and Company—where she had responsibility for Merck’s ESG score compliance). Dr. Gerberding’s career provides a case history illustrating the ties between the administrative state and corporate America.

The likes of you and I cannot “give” to the federal government, as under the Federal Acquisition Regulations this is considered to be a risk for exerting undue influence. But the CDC has established a nonprofit “CDC Foundation.” According to the CDC’s own website [419]: Established by Congress as an independent, nonprofit organization, the CDC Foundation is the sole entity authorized by Congress to mobilize philanthropic partners and private-sector resources to support CDC’s critical health protection mission. Likewise, the NIH has established the “Foundation for the National Institutes of Health,” currently headed by CEO Dr. Julie Gerberding (formerly CDC director, then president of Merck Vaccines, then chief patient officer and executive vice president, Population Health & Sustainability at Merck and Company—where she had responsibility for Merck’s ESG score compliance). Dr. Gerberding’s career provides a case history illustrating the ties between the administrative state and corporate America. These congressionally chartered nonprofit organizations provide a vehicle whereby the medical-pharmaceutical complex can funnel money into the NIH and CDC to influence both research agendas and policies.

That 2006 ACIP panel recommended two new blockbuster Merck shots: the Gardasil HPV vaccine for all girls ages nine through twenty-six,76 and three doses of a Merck rotavirus vaccine, Rotateq, for infants at ages two, four, and six months.77 Both Bill Gates78 and Tony Fauci (via NIAID)79 had provided seed and clinical trial funding for the development of both Gardasil and the rotavirus vaccine.80,81 Merck maintained it had not tested either vaccine against an inert placebo in pre-approval trials, so no one could scientifically predict if the vaccines would avert more injuries or cancers than they would cause.

In 1833, chemists isolated the alkaloid hyoscyamine from henbane and the Merck company in Darmstadt began marketing it for various nonpsychiatric indications. Finally in 1868, the Viennese pharmacologist Karl Schroff established that hyoscyamus acted as a sedative and hypnotic.

Now it was dark as coal. The forest rang with sounds. Hoot owls called back and forth. There was a quick cry from some sort of creature. Merck heard rustling, but he knew the rustling wasn’t human. He could have sworn he heard a catamount screech. It was far away and up high. Once, and only once, a coyote yipped, then sang its shrill tune for half a minute. None of his kith and kin joined in. Merck watched, his eyes perfectly adjusted to the night. He could see the horse wandering around by Thad’s grave. There was a thin trickle nearby and the horse discovered it. Faintly, Merck could hear it drink.

The Germans were world leaders in another class of substances as well: the companies Merck, Boehringer, and Knoll controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine market.

But the swine flu pandemic was a dud, and HHS’s response was a global embarrassment. Only one casualty—a soldier at Fort Dix34—succumbed to the “pandemic,” and Merck’s experimental vaccine triggered a national epidemic of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a devastating form of paralysis resembling polio, before regulators recalled the jab.

Offit uses these plugola tomes to exalt a wide range of “miracle” pharma products, to vilify vaccine hesitancy, and gaslight and bully the mothers of vaccine-injured children. Merck launders hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal payments to Offit through bulk purchases of these propaganda broadsides, which the company then distributes to pediatricians across the country.89 Offit is the most visible spokesperson for Pharma, its allied industries, and the chemical paradigm in general.

Pfizer, was racing Merck neck and neck with its own anti-viral pill, PF-07321332,82 an ivermectin knockoff that is so similar to IVM (except, of course, in price point) that critics call it “Pfizermectin.”83 Like IVM, it is also a protease-inhibiting anti-parasitic.

This was the birth not only of the Merck Company, which still thrives today, but of the modern pharmaceutical industry as a whole. When injections were invented in 1850, there was no stopping the victory parade of morphine. The painkiller was used in the American Civil War of 1861–65 and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Soon morphine fixes were doing the rounds as normal procedure.2

In June 2017, for example, a cyber attack called “NotPetya” disabled computer systems worldwide. The ransomware attacks disrupted everything from radiation monitoring at the Chernobyl nuclear site to shipping operations in India, and its victims ranged from Russian oil company Rosneft to American pharmaceutical giant Merck.

But most importantly, ivermectin is also a low-profit competitor for another new Merck product for COVID-19—a high-cost antiviral drug, molnupiravir, for which Merck had the highest financial ambitions.

Not only was the drug developed with taxpayer money, but its $712 per dose price to the taxpayer is forty times more than Merck’s $17.64 cost of production. Merck, which expects to make $7 billion per year on the new blockbuster,

the vaccine was not only ineffective, but researchers reported alarming safety signals that caused a safety monitoring committee to halt the study. Furthermore, instead of preventing infection, the Merck/NIAID researchers reported data suggesting the vaccine actually raised the risk of contracting HIV!

Gates Foundation currently holds corporate stocks and bonds in drug companies like Merck, GSK, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, and Sanofi.69 Gates also has heavy positions in Gilead, Biogen, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Novavax, and Inovio. The foundation’s website candidly declares its mission to “seek more effective models of collaboration with major vaccine manufacturers to better identify and pursue mutually beneficial opportunities.

The Times reported coyly that “The PAVE trial had been postponed after a test of the Merck vaccine failed in its two main objectives: to prevent infection and to lower the amount of HIV in the blood among those who became infected.

During clinical trials, Merck was unable to show that Gardasil was effective against cervical cancers.173 Instead, the studies showed the vaccine actually increases cervical cancer by 46.3 percent in women exposed to HPV prior to vaccination—perhaps one-third of all women.

Merck & Co Evaluating a Drug Licensing Opportunity Case Study Solution, This investigates the valuation of a chance to permit a compound before it enters clinical trials. Portrays Merck's choice tree assessment procedure is

Vioxx was believed to have caused more than sixty thousand deaths. Merck, the producer of the drug, is the second largest pharmaceutical corporation in the U.S., and profited tremendously from Vioxx, which earned $2.5 billion in sales in 2003 alone. When the drug was pulled due in large part to evidence that it contributed to fatal heart attacks and strokes, analysts anticipated that the judgment against Merck could run up to $25 billion. Yet the plea bargain reached in 2012 resulted in a fine of only $321 million, a mere blip on Merck’s bottom line.

Lider Firmaların Tipik Özellikleri Abbott: Adaylardaki kuvvetli insan ilişkileri ve hırslı satış yeteneklerine önem verir. Forest: Kurumsal satış için hırslı bir yaklaşıma sahip adaylarla ilgilenir. GSK: Gerekli donanıma ve muhafazakar bir karaktere sahip adayları tercih eder. Adayların ayrıca farmakoloji testlerinden geçmesi gerekir. Johnson ve Johnson: Parlak bir satış deneyimine sahip, etkileyici not ortalamasıyla mezun olmuş adayları tercih eder. Merck: Klinik bilgiye ve/veya deneyime önem verir. Pfizer: Liderlik deneyimine sahip adaylar arar ve askeri hizmet deneyimine önem verir.

The chairman of Merck took home $17.9 million in 2010, as Merck laid off sixteen thousand workers and announced layoffs of twenty-eight thousand more. The CEO of Bank of America raked in $10 million, while the bank announced it was firing thirty thousand employees. Even

Boger knew that stories have to be accessible and that what investors want most from them is affirmation, so he molded Vertex’s slide show not as a disquisition on science or business strategy, but as a quest. The grail—the object of the quest—was structure-based design and its transcendent prize of safer, smarter, more profitable drugs. The impetus, as always in such stories, was a combination of righteousness and greed; Vertex had a better way to discover drugs than screening and biotechnology (both of which, Boger would say, were terminally limited) and was intent on capturing the spoils of its victory whole. The rationale for the quest was the company’s unique melding of disciplines and technologies, which he represented as a kind of circular flying wedge, and its scientists, who, he noted, all came from the world’s most powerful research institutions. Harvard, naturally, was a key supporting element, as was Merck, and on the financial side, Benno Schmidt. FK-506 and immunosuppression were the story’s set pieces, meant to illustrate its correctness.

But as Bill Gates said to us when Mark and I met with him in his Seattle-area office, “People invest in high-probability scenarios: the markets that are there. And these low-probability things that maybe you should buy an insurance policy for by investing in capacity up front, don’t get done. Society allocates resources primarily in this capitalistic way. The irony is that there’s really no reward for being the one who anticipates the challenge.” Every time there is a new, serious viral outbreak, such as Ebola in 2012 and Zika in 2016, there is a public outcry, a demand to know why a vaccine wasn’t available to combat this latest threat. Next a public health official predicts a vaccine will be available in x number of months. These predictions almost always turn out to be wrong. And even if they’re right, there are problems in getting the vaccine production scaled up to meet the size and location of the threat, or the virus has receded to where it came from and there is no longer a demand for prevention or treatment. Here is Bill Gates again: Unfortunately, the message from the private sector has been quite negative, like H1N1 [the 2009 epidemic influenza strain]: A lot of vaccine was procured because people thought it would spread. Then, after it was all over, they sort of persecuted the WHO people and claimed GSK [GlaxoSmithKline] sold this stuff and they should have known the thing would end and it was a waste of money. That was bad. Even with Ebola, these guys—Merck, GSK, and J & J [Johnson & Johnson]—all spent a bunch of money and it’s not clear they won’t have wasted their money. They’re not break-even at this stage for the things they went and did, even though at the time everyone was saying, “Of course you’ll get paid. Just go and do all this stuff.” So it does attenuate the responsiveness. This model will never work or serve our worldwide needs. Yet if we don’t change the model, the outcome will not change, either.

—“Sex class is so deep as to be invisible”—The Dialectic of Sex is a passionate, brilliant and uncompromising book.

The adventures of the dialectic,” writes Maurice Merleau- Ponty, “are errors through which it must pass, since it is in principle a thought with several centers and several points of entry, and because it needs time to explore them all.” If ever a text should be read as a work of what Merleau-Ponty calls situated consciousness—both that of the writer and the reader—it is this transmission from the earliest years of second wave feminism. As he writes of its predecessors, so we conclude of The Dialectic of Sex: “it is incomplete so long as it does not pass into other perspectives and into the perspectives of others.

In the following reading of Firestone on the question of technology I suggest we do read her as flawed and as “failed,” but that this is both a necessary condition of the well-known contradictions that inevitably beset the feminist movement more broadly, and that they are what Firestone told us to expect (and why).

In the same way that Firestone’s embrace of scientific and technological progress as manifest destiny tips its hat to Marx and Engels, so also it resembles (perhaps even more closely) the Marxist-inspired biofuturism of the interwar period, particularly in Britain, in the work of writers such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Julian Huxley, Conrad Waddington, and their contemporaries (including Gregory Bateson and Joseph Needham, the latter of whose embryological interests led to his enduring fascination with the history of technology in China). Interestingly, it is also in these early twentieth century writings that ideas about artificial reproduction, cybernation, space travel, genetic modification, and ectogenesis abound. As cultural theorist Susan Squier has demonstrated, debates about ectogenesis were crucial to both the scientific ambitions and futuristic narratives of many of the United Kingdom’s most eminent biologists from the 1920s and the 1930s onward. As John Burdon Sanderson (“Jack”) Haldane speculated in his famous 1923 paper “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” (originally read to the Heretics society in Cambridge) ectogenesis could provide a more efficient and rational basis for human reproduction in the future: [W]e can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.

Firestone’s comprehensive vision of a future, more progressive era defined by greater reproductive control seems strongly influenced by the tradition that equated technological innovation with social progress through greater mastery of human evolution— a tradition we might call progressive biofuturism.

The critique of the male medical establishment and in particular the medicalization of childbirth were already becoming prominent concerns within the emerging women’s health movement, and engendering its related critiques of biological determinism, sexism in science, and patriarchal epistemology. At the same time, the issue of population control dominated the global planning agenda, as well as the family planning one. The intertwined debates about abortion, contraception, planned parenthood, and population growth all concerned access to technology, improvements in basic research on reproduction, and technological innovation, and espoused a linear technological trajectory of increased biological control in which birth control = population control = evolutionary control.

In Firestone’s dialectic of tech (or specifically reprotech), it is the revolutionary capacity of technological progress that establishes the crucial link between feminism, population control, and ecological sustainability. Greater technological control over both production and reproduction is thus the ultimate ethical and political imperative that links the future of the female to the future of the human race, as the rate of population growth eventually becomes a matter of human survival, against which biology can no longer be protected as a “moral” question. “Thus,” she argued, in view of accelerating technology, a revolutionary ecological movement would have the same aim as the feminist movement: control of the new technology for humane purposes, the establishment of a new equilibrium between man and the new artificial environment he is creating, to replace the destroyed “natural” balance.

Women still bear the vast brunt of the physical, emotional, and organizational labor involved in contraceptive use — whether any devices are available at all, whether they are safe or not, and when they fail. For the majority of the world’s women modern contraceptive measures such as the pill, condoms, injectibles, or IUDS are simply not an option—a situation that is exacerbated by the matricidal policies toward abortion and family planning by many of the world’s wealthiest countries (only family planning based on abstinence was supported under the “pro-Africa” Bush administration — a policy with extremely deleterious consequences for the ability of anti-retroviral treatment to prevent the spread of AIDS as well as for rates of maternal and child mortality). Access to safe, affordable, or free abortion is similarly limited. Famously, there is no country in the world where women have the legal right freely to make up their own minds about termination or continuation of pregnancy. Thus, despite the emphasis by many modern democratic nations on the protection of various individual rights and freedoms, women’s reproductive rights remain in an essentially pre-modern condition—a condition decried by both Firestone and Beauvoir as biological feudalism.

Indeed they are entirely opposite—while the former seeks to eliminate reproductive difference the latter intensifies it. If there is any take-home lesson from the literature on IVF or surrogacy it is that they are costly, painful and labor intensive procedures in which women are not less defined by sex, gender or biology but more so. As a consequence this highly medicalized and increasingly commercialized — but almost wholly unregulated, undocumented and unmonitored — sector, which is largely orientated toward the production of nuclear families (even, controversially, among lesbians), is unlikely to become a force that liberates women. What Firestone provides is a helpful set of insights into precisely how and why this would be exactly what we would expect to happen, much as she might be as unlikely as any of her feminist contemporaries to prescribe a solution (though one suspects she would have told women to abandon the take-home baby aspiration along with the quest for a perfect bustline).

First if this future is beyond technology — for there is a hint that technology dissolves into a new form of communication — it is also, of course, and this was the point, beyond sex class. Androgyny is a negative definition for what would in the end not be negative but generalized. The genuinely revolutionary demand made by The Dialectic of Sex, is not for artificial reproduction, or women’s liberation, or a technological utopia, but for a culture in which the very idea that genital difference influenced all forms of life would seem quite simply ludicrous, as unlikely, as mythical, as the idea that from dragon’s teeth would spring armed men . . . .

A month later Dr. Cartwright sends me a note of congratulations. He has been able to make an arrangement with Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, for access to the immunotherapy drug here at Duke, and the news fills me with a bright hope. No more 3:45 a.m. wakeups. No more hours on the phone with airline companies, trying to fix a haywire flight--- or relying on donations to afford the flights in the first place. A painful chapter of my life will finally close.

A mutual cancellation: in an article Firestone approvingly cites Kathie Amatniek’s Progression on the stages of women, from traditional womanhood (“beautiful but powerless”), to uppity women, through sisterhood (“Powerful!”), to the final goal, “HUMANHOOD THE ULTIMATE!” The terminal priority of the female sex is not the end point of this revolution and nor is an information revolution, if this implies the subordination of human relations to machine logics. This kind of stance may come as some surprise to those who remember Firestone for her artificial wombs and presume her feminism aligns directly with those later versions of technophile feminism that were resolutely anti-human and explicitly set out to fuse with information technology rather than pass through it. It is tempting to suggest that the kinds of technological fixes for which Firestone is best known are essentially located not in the final phase of this model, but rather pre-figure forms of existence that might be expected to develop in the middle (transitional) stage.

The famous feminist fallacy version of Firestone also requires that we forget her repeated proviso that without a revolutionary transformation of society’s views of gender, kinship, and marriage new reproductive technologies would be more likely to further subordinate women than to liberate them (“to envision it in the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare,” she cautioned). As Debora Halbert points out in a more careful reading of The Dialectic of Sex on the question of technology, Firestone clearly articulated [that] the problem is not [reproductive] technology but the underlying sex-roles that it may or may not reproduce . . . [T]echnology alone will not liberate women and men, instead there must be a transformation in the way sex-roles are understood, a transformation that can only take place if technology is used to give women choices other than childrearing.

It is not enough simply to point out that Firestone insisted that technology alone can never “liberate” social relations. Such a response leaves unanswered the question of why she has been so often portrayed as saying that it can. Ironically, the common misreading of Firestone on this point only confirms one of her manifesto’s central claims — that the “dialectic of sex” cannot even be fully comprehended in a society in which questioning its a priori status is so counter- intuitive as to appear “insane.” It thus remains important to ask what the positioning of Firestone as a naïve technological determinist and the frequent chastisement of (an oversimplified version of) her claim that new reproductive technologies could bring about women’s liberation reveals about the evolution of feminist debate over reproduction and technology?

Prepare the ground as Firestone may, insisting on the sober materialist approach to analysis, tracking the history, there is a sense here, that despite all this, technology continually exceeds its assigned role — if that role is simply to be the instrument through which to realize the possible in the real. It contains something more, a desire: the state of feminism is such that it needs something, and technology becomes that, or comes to stand for that something.

In Something’s Missing, Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch discuss what they term the shrinking of utopian consciousness within technocratic modernism and in so doing make a useful distinction between banal and revolutionary forms of utopia. The first are entrenched in the dominant social order, tending to confirm or perfect it. On this basis they contain nothing that is not already possible and have no potential that is not already known. The second, the revolutionary forms, provoke the genuinely new, and as a consequence, are not yet possible. This kind of utopia, according to Bloch, is [n]ot . . . nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it. Not only if we travel there, but in that we travel there, the island of utopia a rises out of the sea of the possible — utopia, but with new contents.

[…] — the problem of the unthinkability of anything outside and beyond the legacies of sexual polarization that limit perception, and above all the invisibility of this problem.

In comparison with cyberfeminist texts rife with irony, gynocentric metaphors, and poetic references to cultural theory, Firestone’s book has an appeal of its own, something that could, following Melissa Gregg, be conceptualized as Firestone’s affective voice. Gregg refers to a particular contagious affect in the forms of address adopted by an author that has the power and effect of engaging readers and activating them into critical practices — be these textual or other. Sarah Franklin has suggested that the importance of The Dialectic of Sex lies in its analysis and critique of gender and discrimination more than in the concrete solutions that it proposes. The appeal of Firestone’s affective voice could well be added to the list: committed to rethinking culture, technology, gender, and society, it is occasionally blunt, seldom ironic, incessantly passionate, and contagious in its urgency.

Firestone is certainly not an uncomplicated technophile. Her attitude to the technologies central to her project is surprisingly indifferent. Her writing is not marked by the technophilia that animates Haraway’s cyborg and makes it so engaging (loveable even) and she is not seduced by the prospect of that technologically achieved divorce from the body that so engaged later cyberfeminism. On the contrary, Firestone wants the body returned to its rightful owner, defended from intruders (which is how developing fetuses are seen). Firestone did not like humans or machines much. The fantasy of pregnancy without “deformation” produces a startling image of body hate and/or body fear. Haraway convincingly reads Firestone’s position in terms of bodily alienation that can only be intensified through its submission to technological domination. On the other hand, Firestone’s problem is not to be solved by dissolution and post-human border confusion, but by a refreshed—if extra-ordinarily defensive — form of bodily integrity. This position finds an echo amongst feminists developing contemporary perspectives on reproductive technologies, many of whom have noted with unease the increasing focus on the child and the relative obliteration of the mother in contemporary fertility discourses.

Irony is a matter of interpretation, of recognizing something as ironic, and there is little guarantee that the views of people producing and reading the texts meet. Indeed, irony involves moments of misunderstanding and messy meaning and it may well function as a kind of boomerang if ironic distance is erased and things are read literally. Saying one thing and meaning another is a means of joining contradictory views but it also has the effect of creating distance. In the case of cyberfeminism, this may mean distance toward cyber/technoculture and feminism alike. It may also be that irony functions more efficiently in the context of experimental media art projects than in the genre of academic writing.

If anything, Firestone puts the techno-theorizing of the late twentieth century into sharp relief, revealing the shamefully apolitical and escapist nature of such projects, which cannot help but exclude the majority of the world’s women and lack any serious claim about the link between technology and emancipation. Rather than do away with sexual difference in the playground of a virtual world, Firestone reminds us through her vulgar materialism that to even have a choice about contraception is perhaps a more pressing need for real, nonvirtual women than the opportunity to perform ambiguity in cyberspace.

In 1998, the avant-garde publisher Semiotext(e) issued Airless Spaces, a collection of Firestone’s stories set in and out of mental hospitals, a life she herself had lived for many of the silent years following the publication of The Dialectic of Sex. Like Piercy’s Connie Ramos, Firestone’s characters are desperate inside the hospital and destitute when out. Years of medication and institutional routine have left one unable to read, write or “care about anything, and love was forgotten”: She was lucid, yes, at what price. She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan. Who is “she” in this story? Airless Spaces contains 51 vignettes, divided into headings such as “Hospitals,” “Losers,” “Obituaries,” and “Suicides I Have Known.” So recognizably autobiographical are elements of these that their status as fiction becomes suspect. (One rather vindictive obituary is for an actual feminist, dead at 50, who had helped to overthrow the founding principles of a woman’s group that Firestone started in the East Village, the coup that finally provoked her withdrawal from the women’s movement.) These romans - à – clef reinforce the question still directed at Firestone’s project: is their author’s self-described “madness” the fate reserved for those who would contest sexual difference?

Although Firestone’s acknowledgment that the personal (the unconscious sexual drives) is not only political but also more fundamental than the political — and indeed structurally prior to any political scenario (democratic, repressive, or revolutionary) makes for a serious and unique challenge and possible contribution to historical materialism, her use of the terminology of the natural/non-natural, in particular, ultimately poses more questions than answers.

Firestone’s approach to the question of sex is refreshingly blunt. Sex difference is real. Men and women exist, and possess asymmetrical physical capacities that have historically made existence for women extremely difficult and frequently unpleasant or even lethal. Firestone’s particular strand of materialism is therefore not only historical but also profoundly biological, thus material in an older, more classically philosophical sense. We can compare Firestone’s materialism to the explicitly “vulgar” materialism of La Mettrie for whom “[t]he human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement.

Firestone accepts that culture and history have played important roles in shaping the way we conceive of men, women, (and children) and their differing roles but that underlying all these interpretations are some basic anatomical continuities — unchangeable until now. It is not therefore economic class that underlies oppression but biological and physical characteristics. As she puts it: “Nature produced the fundamental inequality.” This claim about the reality of sex difference and its natural consequences —there are women and there are men and women suffer precisely because of their womanness — puts her at odds with the majority of feminism, past and present. She is interested neither in more subtle analyses of the cultural meaning of sex and gender, nor in reclaiming a positive essence of female physicality (celebrating birth, for example, or the specificities of female sexual experience). As Stella Sandford puts it: “On the main points that constitute her distinctive contribution to feminist theory she finds herself in opposition to the mainstream of US radical feminism.

Chris Scalet, the former CIO at Merck for many years, “I would always start the conversation in terms of what is the meaning for the business. They are never IT conversations or IT projects; they are always business enabler projects.

As the cases of Merck, Google, and Amazon illustrate, your most important customers are not those that generate the most revenue but those that can unlock the most value in your business.

Merck • Corporate social responsibility • Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company • Science-based innovation • Honesty and integrity • Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity Nordstrom

For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck’s top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats.* This “kill the company” exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain-framed activity in terms of losses.

Then there’s the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance (USFRA), a front group partnered with biotech and chemical giants like Bayer and Monsanto, along with Elanco (makers of conventional animal feed) and Merck Animal Health (makers of animal antibiotics and vaccines). 21 USFRA spends millions every year promoting the use of routine antibiotics in farm animals, GMOs, and the safety of synthetic pesticides and conventional agriculture.

The negative result in the rat experiment was a False Fail—a result mistakenly attributed to the loonshot but actually a flaw in the test. Sankyo persisted through that fail, because of Endo. It was winning the race. Because of Endo, it was the first to discover a statin, the first to patent a statin, the first to test statins in humans, and the first to see clinical benefit in patients. But it gave up at the next False Fail, after Endo had left: the spurious results in dogs. The company handed its share of $300 billion to Merck.

Ben Shapiro, antiguo director del departamento de investigación farmacológica (incluido el campo de la neurociencia) de Merck Research Laboratories, se ha unido al equipo directivo de una empresa dedicada al diseño de juegos que aumentan la concentración y minimizan las distracciones. Shapiro ve ventajas en el uso, para tales propósitos, de una práctica inteligente que reemplace a la medicación. «Ese tipo de juegos –me dice– podrían desacelerar la pérdida de funciones cognitivas que acompañan al envejecimiento.» Y luego añade: «No se centre, si quiere mejorar la vida mental de la gente, en el logro de objetivos moleculares, sino de objetivos mentales. La medicación es un abordaje aleatorio, porque la naturaleza emplea las mismas moléculas para objetivos muy diferentes». El doctor Merzenich, por su parte, concede poca importancia a los beneficios aleatorios –y decididamente heterogéneos– de los juegos que llenan los estantes de las tiendas y prefiere los juegos confeccionados a medida para desarrollar un determinado conjunto de habilidades cognitivas. La nueva generación de aplicaciones de entrenamiento cerebral –señala Douglas Gentile– debería aplicar las técnicas de la práctica inteligente con las que los maestros excelentes se hallan más familiarizados: identificar claramente los objetivos de niveles cada vez más difíciles; adaptarse al ritmo concreto de cada alumno; feedback inmediato y retos prácticos graduales que permitan el logro de la maestría, y ejercitar la misma habilidad en contextos diferentes para favorecer, de ese modo, su transferencia. Hay quienes afirman que, en el futuro, los juegos de entrenamiento cerebral formarán parte de los recursos educativos habituales y que los mejores de ellos recopilarán, a modo de tutores cognitivos empáticos, datos sobre todos los jugadores mientras estos tratan de satisfacer al mismo tiempo las exigencias del juego. Entretanto, sin embargo, los expertos se ven obligados a admitir, aunque les pese, que el dinero invertido en tales aplicaciones educativas resulta ridículo comparado con los presupuestos que las empresas destinan a la creación de juegos. Quizás por eso las herramientas que se dedican a adiestrar el cerebro no han alcanzado, por el momento, más que un triste eco del estruendo provocado por juegos como Grand Theft Auto. Pero hay ciertos indicios de que eso está cambiando.

In the ’70s I was flying high as a kite on pure, pure Merck cocaine, the fluffy pharmaceutical blow.