Dr. Mark Fishman ’72 is the President of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, the research branch of the pharmaceutical company Novartis. Before joining Novartis in 2002, Dr. Fishman was chief of cardiology and director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as a medical professor at Harvard Medical School.

We care about health care, and view health as a basic human right. It follows that we would then view health care as a right, too. When we are sick, we want to be able to seek affordable, high-quality, efficient medical care, and we tend to think that everyone should be able to. How far does the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act go in making this a reality for all Americans?

Whether or not the federal government should legalize marijuana has been heavily debated since the 1970s. Since the 1970s, minor marijuana offenses have been decriminalized in 11 states and penalties have been significantly lowered in all others. Today, there exists an extreme disconnect between federal and state laws and attitudes toward marijuana decriminalization and legalization.

The patent cliff – the result of many major drug companies losing their patent protection over the course of 2013. Several of the most profitable pharmaceutical companies, with brand name drugs such as Plavix and Lexapro, will be forced to share their massive profits with generic companies that can provide customers with lower priced versions of the previously exclusive drugs.

Drug discovery has been, for the most part, a traditionally industrial conquest. Medical research through industry provides a direct, goal-oriented approach to investigating new molecules. By contrast, academic research primarily consists of basic research and focuses on scientific understanding over practicality. Partially due to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allows universities to use federal funding for research while retaining patent rights, the pharmaceutical world has begun to be shared by both industrial research and academic research.