Jeremy Greene to Lecture on History of Pharmaceutical Trademarks

Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Room 217, Perkins Library, Duke University
Contact: Rachel Ingold, (919) 684-8459 or rachel.ingold(at)duke.edu

Join the History of Medicine Collections for our fall Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series event to be held on Wednesday, October 23, 2013, in Room 217 of Perkins Library on Duke University’s West Campus. Jeremy Greene, M.D., Ph.D., will be presenting “The materiality of the brand: Form, function and the pharmaceutical trademark.”

Dr. Greene’s talk will explore the limits of patents and trademarks in the sphere of pharmaceutical intellectual property, and illuminate a century of controversy over the clinical, public health, and financial value of “look-alike drugs,” generic drugs that imitated their brand-name counterparts down to exact parameters of size, shape, and color. His historical analysis addresses thorny questions about which qualities of a brand-name drug are considered private property and whether parts of a drug other than its active ingredients (e.g., pill color) can affect its clinical function.

Dr. Greene is Associate Professor, Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for the History of Medicine. His broader research interests focus on the history of disease, the history of global health, and the relationship between medicine and the marketplace. Dr. Greene also practices internal medicine at the East Baltimore Medical Center and the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. He has published on a wide variety of topics and his most recent book with Elizabeth Siegel Watkins is, Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

Please note Dr. Greene will also be giving a talk at noon on October 23 on Imitation and Innovation: A Brief History of ‘Me-Too’ Drugs. This talk will be held from 12:00-1:00 pm in the Great Hall of the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Center for Health Education at the Duke University Medical Center.

Sponsored by the History of Medicine Collections, the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine.