Twentieth century biology began with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work on peas and ended with the sequencing of the human genome. In between came Thomas Morgan's studies of fruit flies, the grand synthesis between genetics and evolutionary biology in the 1930s, and Watson and Crick's publication in 1953 of the double helix structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid (“DNA”), the substance in the nucleus of cells, which carries the genetic code of all eukaryotic life.

The genetics of the second half of the century focused on learning how DNA coded for proteins, how to splice, clone, and recombine pieces of DNA, and how genetic mutations caused disease. In the late 1980s, a project to identify the actual sequence of all 3.2 billion base pairs of the human genome began. In June 1999, President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair announced that a working draft of the human genome was complete, with the final completed draft to 99.9% accuracy expected in May 2003, fifty years after the publication of Watson and Crick's landmark paper.

Mental illness is a serious problem in the United States. Based on “current epidemiological estimates, at least one in five people has a diagnosable mental disorder during the course of a year.” Fortunately, many of these disorders respond positively to psychotropic medications. While psychiatrists write some of the prescriptions for psychotropic medications, primary care physicians write more of them. State legislatures, seeking to expand patient access to pharmacological treatment, granted physician assistants and nurse practitioners prescriptive authority for psychotropic medications. Over the past decade other groups have gained some form of prescriptive authority. Currently, psychologists comprise the primary group seeking prescriptive authority for psychotropic medications.

The American Society for the Advancement of Pharmacotherapy (“ASAP”), a division of the American Psychological Association (“APA”), spearheads the drive for psychologists to gain prescriptive authority. The American Psychological Association offers five main reasons why legislatures should grant psychologists this privilege: 1) psychologists’ education and clinical training better qualify them to diagnose and treat mental illness in comparison with primary care physicians; 2) the Department of Defense Psychopharmacology Demonstration Project (“PDP”) demonstrated non-physician psychologists can prescribe psychotropic medications safely; 3) the recommended post-doctoral training requirements adequately prepare psychologists to prescribe safely psychotropic medications; 4) this privilege will increase availability of mental healthcare services, especially in rural areas; and 5) this privilege will result in an overall reduction in medical expenses, because patients will visit only one healthcare provider instead of two–one for psychotherapy and one for medication.

The use of pharmaceutical products in the United States has increased more than the use of any other health resource from 1960 to 1990. In excess of 9,600 drugs were on the market in 1984, and the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) approves approximately 30 new drugs and countless new applications for alterations of already existing drugs each year. In 2001, the $300 billion pharmaceutical industry sold $154 billion worth of prescription drugs in the United States alone, nearly doubling its $78.9 billion in sales in 1997. With such a rapid increase in market domination and expenditures, the U.S. government and many hospitals have focused their attention on the sales and pricing practices of pharmaceutical companies, as well as other potential factors contributing to these escalating prices. One such cause of the steadily increasing prices of brand name pharmaceuticals is the sale of fake or counterfeit pharmaceuticals (also called “look-alike” drugs).