Donald W. Light

Donald Light is a professor of medical and economic sociology who has written extensively about health care policy, the sociology of the medical profession, the US and other advanced health care systems, and more recently pharmaceutical policy around issues of global and institutional ethics. He is a founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2012-13 was a Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Light is concerned that so few new drugs are better than existing ones, yet put patients at risk for adverse drug reactions. They have become an epidemic -- 46 million a year and the 5th leading cause of death. Trained at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and Brandeis University, he is a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and is the Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford University. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. Related research shows that clinical trials are done poorly and designed to minimize evidence of side effects. Costs of research are much lower than claimed, and most money for discovering new medicines comes from public sources already.