A White Woman found She Had West African DNA

choi

I look into the fourth report in Bloombewrg BusinessWeek. There is no need to go back to read it.

(4) Dong Lyu and Rachel Chang with Drew Armstrong, John Lauerman and James Patron, The Quest for China's Patients.


Note:
(a) online title: China’s $132 Billion Market Pushes Big Pharma Into Uncharted Territory. "Big Pharma means foreign companies, outside China.
(b) "in Wuxi Children's Hospital 无锡市儿童医院 * * * the room is one of roughly 15,000 pediatric nebulization centers that AstraZeneca Plc has built in China in partnership with local governments and medical device companies. The idea is to drive usage of the British drugmaker's Pulmicort, an inhaled asthma drug, among Chinese kids whose family cannot afford to buy the device to use at home. * * * the country's [China's] $132 billion drug market [America's is about four times as large, some $400 billion]. It's the only nation outside the US that generates more than $100 billion in annual revenue * * * AstraZeneca, which got about 18% of its total revenue of $22 billion from China in 2018 and is among the international drugmakers with the largest exposure to that market, plans to add more nebulization centers next year [in China] * * * [China] has almost 4 million people diagnosed with cancer each year, often at a late stage and with survival rates that can lag those of other countries. * * * Pfizer Inc, the largest US drugmaker * * * GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the US's largest drugmaker * * * (A quality nebulizer for home use costs about $150, whereas each nebulizer treatment done at one of its [AstraZeneca's Chinese] facilities  xist 8 yuan to 12 yuan -- or about $1.10 to $1.70 -- the drugmaker estimates.) * * * AstraZeneca's [executive vice president for international markets Leo] Wang acknowledges that the payoffs on the investments the company is making are unlikely to come quickly."
(i) "an English-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company [based in Cambridge, England] * * * The company was founded in 1999 through the merger of the Swedish Astra AB and the English Zeneca Group."  en.wikipedia.org for "AstraZeneca."
(ii) US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved in 2000 AstraZeneca's Pulmicort (brand name for budesonide, a corticosteroid) to treat asthma; and in 2014 to treat ulcerative colitis.

The budesonide received US patent 3929768 in 1975 (application for patent in 1973), assigned to Saab Bofors AB.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3929768A/en
(iii) China's "$132 billion drug market"
(A) I introduced the following article in an Oct 2, 2019 posting, which did not quote anything (because I thought that Economist article was largely wishful thinking, about pie in the sky) but did make notations.

Chinese drugmakers | A Rising Star; China's pharmaceutical industry is growing up.
("Markets' optimism is doubtless fuelled by the huge promise of China's pharmaceutical industry. In 2016 the country became the world's second-biggest drug market. In 2018 sales reached $137bn, doubling in just six years. They are projected to be worth half of America's by 2030, up from a quarter now. Much of ththis will come not from foreign drugmakers but domestic ones")

McKinsey consultancy cited IMS for the China's 2018 estimates; IMS reports are for sale, and I did not get to read them.
(B) Biopharmaceutical Industry Spotlight. SelectUSA.gov, undated
https://www.selectusa.gov/pharma ... tries-united-states
("The United States is the largest market for biopharmaceuticals, accounting for around a third of the global market, and is the world leader in biopharmaceutical R&D")

There is no need to read the rest of this link.
(C) 2016 Top Markets Report Pharmaceuticals. International Trade Administration, US Department of Commerce, undated
https://www.trade.gov/topmarkets ... ecutive_Summary.pdf
(Figure 2 US Snapshot: Total pharmaceutical sales: $333 billion)

Quote: "the US pharmaceutical industry * * * added an estimated $790 billion to the economy in 2014 [ie, economic output]. * * * the United States is the world's largest free-pricing market for pharmaceuticals. As a result, prices are comparatively
high to make up for lower profits in other countries and to cover R&D costs. The United States also has high per capita incomes, unmatched access to healthcare, a large elderly population, a culture of end-of-life prolongation, high rates of chronic diseases and drug consumption and a strong consumer preference for innovative drugs. * * * Fast growing segments of the pharmaceutical market include biologics [monoclonal antibodies] and generics. Biologics now account for over a third of all new drugs in clinical trials or awaiting FDA approval [footnote omitted]. US generic drug sales reached an estimated $70 billion, representing a quarter of the global market, due to a large number of drugs going off-patent and healthcare reforms favoring
generics. * * * [US] imported [drugs] from Western European countries, such as Ireland, Germany and Switzerland [top three in that order]. * * * [US drug] imports were valued at over $86 billion in 2015, making it the world's largest importer of pharmaceuticals.  With $47 billion in exports in 2015, pharmaceuticals rank as one the top exporting sectors for IP-intensive industries in the United States [see Figure 1].

Note these are 2016 numbers.

Take notice that Figure 1 shows in 2016 Taiwan (ranked No 16) was a larger export market than China (No 20) for pharmaceuticals (produced in US by domestic and foreign drugmakers). So I question how IMS calculates China's drug market: Does IMS include Chinese purchases when they travel abroad and bring them back?
(iv) "Pfizer Inc, the largest US drugmaker"

US Top 10 Pharmaceutical Companies by Market Turnover. Lewes, Delaware: Market Research Reports, Inc, undated
https://www.marketresearchreport ... ies-market-turnover
("DISCLAIMER: * Rankings have been provided on the basis of pharma division revune [sic], if you consider total revenue of a company rankings might change")

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Amy Dockser Marcus, DNA Test Scrambles Racial Identity; Result sent Christine Jacobsen, a white woman, in search of her black family. Wall Street Journal, Nov 2, 2019 (front page).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-w ... -family-11572625171

My comment:
(a) Of Christine Jacobsen's paternal grandparents: "The couple danced at the Cotton Club. * * * The couple divorced in 1930 and Preston Paul Meeres [paternal grandfather] went to Europe, where he danced—and was photographed—with Josephine Baker. "
(i) Cotton Club
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Club
(a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940 [patronized by whites] but the venue featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the era)
(ii) Josephine Baker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Baker
(1906 – 1975; born Freda Josephine McDonald in St Louis, Missouri; "bisexual * * * [a] short-lived marriage * * * to [second husband] Willie Baker in 1921; she retained Baker's last name because her career began taking off during that time, and it was the name by which she became best known")

("During her early career Baker was renowned as a dancer * * * Her costume, consisting of only a girdle of artificial bananas, became an iconic image and a symbol of the Jazz Age and the 1920s. * * * renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937 [third of her four husbands]

(b) "Ms Jacobsen spent hours every day researching the Meeres family and the Harlem Renaissance. She read books about African-American history, and took the train from her home in Goshen, NY, into New York City to pore over archival photos of her biological grandparents and father in their dancing costumes * * * Her father liked to eat a spicy dish of pigeon peas and rice
(i) Harlem Renaissance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance
(ii) Goshen, New York
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goshen,_New_York
(iii) pigeon pea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_pea

(c) A biologist by training, I never believe DNA testing can reveal ancestry's country origin. For one, those testing sites never disclose how they know, perhaps thanks to trade secret. For another, people have moved around since ancient times. Further, how come no cite says it knows country origin of East Asia countries, say.