Those show great distribution of medical advances, to be sure.
But so many of them are old.
The discovery of penicillin, for example ... goes back to 1928.
I was curious more about who's making the cutting-edge discoveries right now.
Aspirin ... hard to nail down its exact history, but you could say the Bayer company first produced something like the modern product in the final years of the 19th century ... though Hippocrates was using the bark and leaves of the willow tree for pain suppression back in the 4th century BC.
The UK epidemiologist A.B. Hill first conceived of proper clinical trials six decades ago or so.
The Andalusian physician Abu Al-Qasim al-Zahrawi performed the first surgical operations a millennium ago.
There are also much more recent discoveries mentioned, such as Viagra.
What I'm curious about is: Which nation is producing the greatest number of medical inventions right now?
In the past five years, for example, how are medical patents distributed?
As far as biotech goes, Scientific American ranks countries by 5 criteria.
worldVIEW: Scorecard
I don't know if intellectual property is the best measure of innovation though. There are tons of patents filed that are never used, and many more that aren't that vital. I don't think patents for drugs for Restless Leg Syndrome are really medically motivated...