Duke Docs Get Dough

Put Up Your Dukes

(from a special correspondent)

Duke University Medical Center announced Monday that it will receive a gift of $35M to help keep the medical establishment from investigating root causes of diseases.

Named after the donor, real estate magnate and Dole Foods owner David Murdock, the study will be called the "Measurement to Understand the Reclassification of Diseases of Cabarrus and Kannapolis" study. The money will be spent on reaffirming the medical community's well-established view that illnesses and diseases are caused exclusively by genes and bad personal "lifestyles."

According to an anonymous Duke official, "The physicians conducting the study will be so busy thinking about genomes and personal vices that the thought of looking at patterns of diseases and the social factors that cause them, such as economic inequality--which will not be alleviated by this gift, simply could not enter their heads."

Rather than put the $35 million towards an active preventive approach to health, the M.U.R.D.O.C.K. study strategy is a more sensational and profitable wait-and-see. The official explained the study's emphasis on developing "personalized treatment tools" for those stricken with disease rather than on prevention: "Big donors want to see the bang for their buck. Since we can't know whose diseases we've prevented, prevention gives us got nothing to show for the money. I mean, what are we going to do? Parade around a bunch of well people and say 'see who we might have saved'? We'll never raise another dime doing that. So we've decided that it's best to just wait for people to get very sick and in dramatic fashion cure one or two of them. Then we can show everyone they could be saved with the best 'personalized treatment tools' money could buy, if they had the money."

One physician anxious to get in on the research action said "Well, I've never actually heard of Carrubus or Kannopolis but they sound like terrible diseases."