Perspective
God Does Not Fund Research
A physiological rights endowment.
A note on genre
The line in the title has served for some time as a private joke. Its use has been to close, quickly and without further argument, a certain kind of complaint that begins with the observation that some molecule vital to the human body has never received a proper trial. The joke does the work in three words. Nobody funds the studies that no one owns. The molecules the body actually depends on are, for the most part, unowned. Therefore, the studies that would establish their therapeutic dose ranges, their tissue-level indications, their interactions with disease, will not be conducted, because there is no party with the standing to conduct them. The joke, once said, ends the conversation.
The present piece exists to say the non-joking version of the same sentence. The non-joking version does more than end the conversation. It reorganises it.
The current epistemic order
The dominant model of medical knowledge, as it functions in 2026, follows a strict sequence. First, a market appears, or a market is anticipated. Second, a molecule is identified whose exclusive use can be defended, by patent, by proprietary formulation, or by regulatory exclusivity. Third, funding flows from the owner of the molecule to the chairs, the trials, and the journals that will produce the evidence. Fourth, the evidence produces the regulatory approval. Fifth, the approval produces access.
The order places the market in position one. Everything else follows. What the human body requires, in this sequence, is not a starting condition. It is not a criterion of selection at any stage. It appears, if at all, as a downstream effect of a market decision made upstream.
The nutritional analogue of this sequence is more textured but obeys the same logic. Where the pharmaceutical industry funds molecules under exclusivity, the agri-food industries of specific regions fund the isolation of signature molecules from their local crops. Blueberry chairs at Laval and Chicoutimi. Cranberry programmes in the American Northeast. Resveratrol departments in California and Bordeaux. Olive polyphenol laboratories in Cordoba. Marine omega-3 institutes in Tromsø. Green tea chemistry at Kyoto. Ginsenoside research at Seoul. In every case, the sequence is preserved. A regional market comes first. The molecule follows. The chair follows the molecule. The research follows the chair.
The universal molecules of human physiology, ascorbic acid at pharmacological doses, magnesium in tissue, potassium in the cell, taurine in the myocardium, choline in the parasympathetic system, do not fit the sequence at any point. There is no proprietor to occupy position one. The chairs cannot be constituted. The research is not commissioned. The evidence, when it exists, comes from the private savings of a small number of individual investigators. Bruce Ames worked at Berkeley on grants he had to defend one at a time. Mildred Seelig published on magnesium for forty years without ever obtaining a laboratory of her own. Abram Hoffer ran his niacin trials out of the Saskatchewan psychiatric services because no other institution would fund them. The classified 5-HT2A agonists, whose ancestral relation to the human nervous system is a matter of biological record, have been outside the sequence for fifty years, and the small number of clinical trials that now exist have been paid for out of philanthropy and private capital, not out of any structural mechanism.
The pattern is not a matter of neglect. It is a matter of construction. The current epistemic order was built to reward molecules that have proprietors. It could not, without dismantling its own architecture, reward molecules that do not.
The inversion
The physiological rights framework proposes a different sequence. First, a right is recognised in law, on the ground that the human body has a determinate constitution that admits of empirical description and that the person is entitled to the maintenance and active restoration of that constitution. Second, the obligation implied by the right requires knowledge of what the body actually needs, at what dose, in what conditions, and under what tests. Third, the funding to produce this knowledge follows from the obligation, in the form of a structural endowment that does not depend on any market decision upstream. Fourth, the evidence follows the funding. Fifth, the access follows the right.
The sequence places the biological constitution of the person in position one. The market, if it appears at all, appears in a downstream and derivative position, or it does not appear.
This is not a novelty. It is the sequence by which several major domains of applied science already function, in every country that has ratified the relevant instruments. It is worth walking through the precedents, because their success rebuts, in advance, the objection that such a sequence cannot produce knowledge at industrial scale.
Precedents
The right to safe work. In France, the Institut national de recherche et de sécurité was constituted in 1947 to produce the ergonomic, toxicological, and epidemiological knowledge required to give effect to the obligations of the employer under the Code du travail. The United States, some years later, chartered the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health as the research arm of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. The United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive plays the same role. In Quebec, the Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et en sécurité du travail was created in 1980. None of these institutes waited for a pharmaceutical proprietor to fund the study of workplace hazards. The right established the obligation. The obligation established the institute. The institute produced the evidence base for the standards. A century ago, industrial toxicology was an amateur discipline conducted by physicians in their spare hours. Today it is a well-funded field with journals, professorships, and international coordination. The transition happened because a right was written down.
The right to a habitable environment. The Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972 in the United States, and their European homologues, created the obligations that gave rise to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire in France, the Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung in Germany, and the European Chemicals Agency. Ecotoxicology, again, was an amateur discipline before these instruments. The isolation of persistent organic pollutants, the characterisation of endocrine disruption at low doses, the study of the reproductive toxicity of thousands of industrial molecules, none of this was funded by anyone until an environmental right was declared and an obligation to enforce it produced the institutes and the budgets. The molecules in question have no proprietors. Their study nonetheless occurs, at a scale of billions of euros per year, because a right sits above them.
The Orphan Drug Act of 1983. The closest analogue in medicine itself is the American Orphan Drug Act. Congress observed that certain diseases affected populations too small to be commercially interesting. It observed that the pharmaceutical industry would not, under its own logic, invest in molecules for these populations. It responded by creating a legal status, orphan indication, a package of tax incentives, an accelerated regulatory pathway, and a fund. Since 1983, more than seven hundred products have been approved under this framework. An entire clinical discipline of rare-disease medicine exists that would not otherwise exist. It exists because the state recognised that a market could not produce the knowledge and decided to produce the knowledge without the market.
The molecule constitutive of human physiology is, in relation to the market, precisely the inverse of the orphan drug. The orphan drug is a molecule that interests few patients and no proprietors. The constitutive molecule is a molecule that interests all patients and no proprietors. In both cases, the market is silent. In both cases, the silence is a design feature of the market, not a defect of the molecule. And in both cases, the appropriate response is the same: a legal instrument that constitutes the obligation and produces the funding without waiting for the market.
The physiological rights endowment
Three institutional forms are defensible. They are not exclusive. In an ambitious version of the project they would be sequenced.
A private endowment on the Wellcome Trust or Howard Hughes model. The Wellcome Trust was constituted from the estate of a pharmaceutical proprietor whose will directed his fortune to biomedical research. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute was constituted from the estate of an American industrialist whose priorities were opaque and whose institute has, since his death, become a well-funded home for open-ended investigator-driven research. Both institutes are private in origin and independent in operation. Both fund research that no market would fund, on the strength of a private decision. A physiological rights endowment on this model would not wait for a legislature. It would require a single donor, or a coalition of donors, willing to constitute the corpus. It has one virtue: it can begin tomorrow. It has one defect: it depends on the philanthropic decision of a specific individual and can be closed by the reversal of that decision.
A national statute on the Orphan Drug Act model, inverted. A statute defining a category of physiologically constitutive and commercially orphan molecules, and attaching to that category a set of fiscal incentives, a fund, and a regulatory pathway. The molecules in the category would include the universal vitamins and minerals at therapeutic doses, the endogenous ligands whose reduced synthesis in disease is measurable, the essential cofactors of mitochondrial function, and the classified compounds whose exclusion from the pharmacopeia rests on legal rather than biological grounds. The statute would be modelled directly on the Orphan Drug Act, with the sole difference that the criterion of orphan status would be commercial rather than epidemiological. Ambition of this order is legislative and slow, but transposable across jurisdictions. The United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia have equivalent instruments to build on.
A General Comment of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The slowest, heaviest, and most universal instrument. A General Comment interpreting the right to health and the right to food as including, in their operational content, the right of every person to the active characterisation and delivery of the constitutive molecules of the human body. The General Comment would place an obligation of means on every state party to the International Covenant, requiring the constitution of national institutes analogous to the labour and environmental precedents already in place. It would take a decade. It would be difficult to reverse. It would be visible in every state report to the Committee thereafter.
The three instruments compound. A private endowment could begin the research. A national statute could scale the funding. A General Comment could universalise the obligation. The physiological rights endowment is not a single institution. It is a stack.
The rhetorical position
The mainstream nutritional discourse, in its current selective form, cannot object to this stack on principle. It uses the same mechanism, whenever the sponsor is a regional agricultural sector, to fund the chairs that study its preferred molecules. It does not describe blueberry anthocyanin research as an assault on the mystery of the matrix. It does not accuse cranberry research programmes of reductionism. The mechanism is available. The mechanism is respectable. It has simply never been extended to the molecules that have no regional sponsor.
The physiological rights framework proposes the extension. It does not propose a new machinery of research. It proposes that the machinery already in place be applied to the molecules that the human body actually requires, in every jurisdiction where a right to health has been recognised. What the blueberry industry does for its anthocyanin, the CESCR should do for ascorbic acid. What the olive council does for its polyphenols, a national physiological rights statute should do for magnesium and potassium and choline. What the regional agri-food chair does for its signature crop, an inverted Orphan Drug Act should do for the mescaline and the psilocybin and the DMT whose relation to the human nervous system is a matter of evolutionary record.
The molecule the body already contains, or already encountered on the evolutionary path that produced its nervous system, is not less deserving of a chair than the anthocyanin. It is more so. The order of respectability, under the current mechanism, has been inverted. A physiological rights endowment restores the order.
What follows
God does not fund research. This is a fact of ordinary observation and it is not going to change. The molecules the body depends on will remain, in the market’s view, orphans of a very particular kind. What is required is the recognition that the orphan is not the molecule. The orphan is the body. And the body has a legal existence that the market does not.
The right that recognises the body will fund the research. The research will produce the evidence. The evidence will justify the access. The order of the sequence is not neutral. It determines what one is allowed to know, and, in the end, what one is allowed to eat, to swallow, to be prescribed, to correct in oneself.
The joke was always the same joke. The proposal is what has been missing.