VIAGRA NEWS

Source: Bloomberg

Date: 21-Feb-2008

Author: James Pressley

Scientists, it turns out, are as oversexed as Wall Street traders. Good thing, too: Without their libidos, we wouldn't have transistors let alone Viagra, judging from "Sex, Science and Profits," Terence Kealey's cheeky look at how people "evolved to make money."

Kealey is a clinical biologist with a keen interest in skin: He writes for journals specializing in dermatology. His new book traces the evolutionary roots of economic growth, from the New Stone Age invention of farming to the 20th-century discovery that DNA regulates inheritance.

Ambling through history with succinct wit, Kealey shows how human evolution led to ownership and trade -- and how markets spur the innovation that creates progress and wealth.

Evolution entails sexual selection, of course: To attract females, peacocks grow outlandish tails, humpback whales learn new songs and scientists publish their findings.

"Humans, too, advertise their sexual fitness," Kealey writes. "They do it by competing for esteem."

Over thousands of years, humans have become hardwired with emotions -- such as guilt, shame and pride -- that foster trust, be it among Renaissance bankers writing foreign-exchange contracts or modern scientists comparing notes at a conference.

Trust breeds cooperation, which is what markets are all about, as Adam Smith observed. Markets eventually became free, notably after England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 ushered in "boring things like property rights and the rule of law," which unleashed the innovations of the Industrial Revolution.

Flying Shuttle

Innovations, like bunnies, beget more innovations. Surveying the Industrial Revolution, Kealey shows how productivity soared not so much because of big technological breakthroughs like the flying shuttle and spinning jenny, as important as they were. What really made the difference, economists say, were the myriad tiny improvements made by tinkering workers and manufacturers.

Contrast that with Bronze Age command economies like Egypt. For all their fabulous wealth, they failed to develop because they immobilized society and crushed trade, Kealey says.

As for ancient Rome, its fall is easy to understand: The empire grew through plunder, not innovation.

"When, at its maximum expansion, the empire ran out of lucrative victims, its expenditure exceeded its income, and the result was misery," he writes, paraphrasing Dickens's Mr. Micawber.

No Soap

The Romans had no crank, which Kealey calls "second only to the wheel in technological significance." Nor did they invent soap. They harnessed their horses with yokes, strangling them when they pulled.

The Dark Ages, by contrast, brought windmills and "felt, trousers, skis, butter, rye, hops and barrels," all without government-funded research, Kealey says. What the Dark Ages did have was trade, which got a nudge from warring feudal lords.

"A lord, fighting for advantage, would need chain mail; but few medieval villages boasted deposits of iron or of the expertise to turn iron ore into armor or weapons. So medieval lords had to trade," he writes.

Turning to modern times, Kealey shows how unpredictable science can be: While working on a treatment for high blood pressure, researchers at Upjohn Co. discovered baldness therapy Rogaine. Upjohn later joined Pfizer Inc., whose own research into high blood pressure led to impotence drug Viagra.

Another snag: Your competitor may benefit more from your discoveries than you do. Scientists at SmithKline created stomach-ulcer drug Tagamet, only to see rival Glaxo Plc come up with a more potent (and more profitable) derivative, Zantac. The two companies later merged into GlaxoSmithKline Plc.

Forget State Funding

Kealey, the vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham in the U.K., mars this fine romp by belaboring his argument that scientists don't need government funding. I wish he had talked more about how war has hastened innovations as different as penicillin and the microwave oven.

Still, he makes a strong case. Studies show that about 90 percent of industrial innovation arises from in-house development of existing technology, not from academic science, he says. Thus the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor went to William Shockley and his colleagues at Bell Labs, Kealey notes.

What's good enough for Shockley is good enough for me.

"Sex, Science and Profits" is published by Heinemann (455 pages, 20 pounds).