More than 80% of elderly people prescribed strong tranquillisers in a sample of British nursing homes were given them with no proper medical justification, according to research published last weekend.

The neuroleptic drugs – administered to quieten patients with what staff call “behavioural problems” – were likely to make their dementias worse and risk making them break their hips or other limbs in falls, say the doctors who conducted the study.

The Alzheimer’s Society said that the finding was true of old people in homes across Britain and could apply to up to 100,000 of the 500,000 in residential care. The report was “a nail in the coffin” for indiscriminate prescribing, said the society’s chief executive, Harry Cayton. The Liberal Democrats’ spokesman for older people, Paul Burstow, said that they were the victims of “a chemical cosh”. Nursing homes, short of trained staff, were turning to chemical cocktails to make patients easy to manage.

The research by five doctors at London teaching hospitals was published in the journal Age And Ageing. The study of nearly 1,000 patients over 65 found that drugs were given to just under 25% of all patients. But medical notes showed the prescriptions were not “appropriate therapy” for 82.8% of those who received them. More than half the prescriptions had not been reviewed for six months.

Canadian researchers don’t have to worry about paying licensing fees for the use of transgenic animals. The nation’s top court ruled last week that higher life forms aren’t patentable.

In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada ended Harvard University’s 17-year quest to obtain Canadian patent protection for its OncoMouse, ruling that the cancer-prone rodent can’t be owned. The court said that OncoMouse, developed by Philip Leder of Harvard Medical School in Boston, isn’t an invention under an 1869 Canadian law that protects “any new and useful art, process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter.”

Writing for the narrow majority, Justice Michael Bastarache made a philosophical argument for the court’s ruling, which stands in contrast to patents granted by 17 nations, including France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. “A complex life form such as a mouse or a chimpanzee cannot easily be characterised as ‘something made by the hands of man,’ ” he wrote. Nor is OncoMouse a “composition of matter,” he added. “Higher life forms are generally regarded as possessing qualities and characteristics that transcend the particular genetic matter of which they are composed,” Bastarache noted. “A person whose genetic makeup is modified by radiation does not cease to be him or herself. Likewise, the same mouse would exist absent the injection of the oncogene into the fertilized egg cell; it simply would not be predisposed to cancer.”

The number of new drugs approved in the United States last year fell to half the annual average over the past five years. The miserable tally of new drug approvals in 2002 – at the time of writing, just 15 new molecular entities had passed FDA review – well down even on the depressingly low average for the last five years – 31 a year, shows just how rare an event success can be in the drug discovery world. And with new drug application numbers down worldwide, concern is beginning to spread beyond the borders of the pharmaceutical industry.

Faced with sparsely populated pipelines, companies are beginning to shift research budgets towards more aggressive marketing of existing products. These are worrying times.

The process of turning ideas into drugs is acknowledged as being the hardest skill to teach new recruits to the drug discovery business. Selecting research targets for new drugs takes place in an environment that is strongly influenced by financial considerations.

Most so called blockbuster drugs were not forecast to be big sellers. The initial sales forecast for tamoxifen was a modest ₤100 000 ($160 000; €150 000).

Generically modified potatoes will play a key part in an ambitious 15-year plan to combat malnutrition among India’s poorest children. Anti-poverty campaigners have greeted the “protato” with cautious support.

The three-pronged attack on childhood mortality would aim to provide children with clean water, better food and vaccines. “Zero child mortality in underprivileged children would be the goal,” says Govindarajan Padmanaban, a biochemist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

Formulated in collaboration with charities, scientists, government institutes and industry, the anti-hunger plan is under consideration by the Indian government. Meanwhile, the protein-rich GM potatoes are in the final stages of testing, prior to being submitted for approval.

Padmanaban, who outlined the plan at a conference at the Royal Society in London last month, hopes Western-based environmental groups and charities will not demonise the project in the same way as they did AstraZeneca’s “golden rice”, a strain modified to make more vitamin A. “The requirements of developing countries are very different from those of rich countries,” he says. “I think it would be morally indefensible to oppose it.”

Asis Datta’s team at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi added the AmA1 gene to potatoes, with the result that they make a third more protein than usual, including substantial amounts of the essential amino acids lysine and methionine. AmA1 is a gene from the amaranth plant, a crop long grown by native South Americans and now available in some Western health food stores.