FORTY YEARS AGO, A BRITISH COMPANY called ICI Pharmaceuticals developed a potent high blood pressure medication called propranolol. It was the first beta blocker, a class of drugs that inhibits fight-or-flight hormones like adrenaline. But it was expensive. So Yusuf Hamied, a 34-year-old chemist at an Indian drugmaker, got his company to start manufacturing a cheaper version. ICI protested to the Indian government, and Hamied found himself face to face with prime minister Indira Gandhi. “Should millions of Indians be denied the use of a lifesaving drug just because the originator doesn’t like the color of our skin?” he asked her.

It was a specious argument – ICI was worried about profits, not skin color – but Gandhi was persuaded. She urged parliament to change the laws governing drug patents, making them apply not to the chemical compounds themselves but to the processes used to manufacture them. If a company like Hamied’s could come up with a different way to make the same beta blocker (or whatever), it could sell its own version in India free and clear.

That one law transformed India’s pharmaceutical industry. Today, Hamied’s company, Cipla, is the third-largest in India, with sales of $651 million in 2005. That’s not much compared to multibillion-dollar concerns like GlaxoSmithKline, but Cipla is still the medicine cabinet to the developing world. As much as 40 percent of the AIDS patients in poor countries who take medications take Cipla drugs.

What Hamied does is legal in India and the countries where Cipla sells drugs. But the company is still making copies largely without permission of the people who hold the patents on the compounds. So to most of the international pharmaceutical industry, Hamied is a pirate.

He is 70, portly, with white hair and wire-frame glasses. But his rhetoric is still inflammatory. Pacing around the Cipla boardroom, he tells the story behind every drug the company makes, punctuating each anecdote by pulling a box of samples from the floor-to-ceiling cabinets and throwing it on the table. These are the copied drugs that earned Cipla its outlaw reputation: anti-cholesterol pills, antibiotics, AIDS treatments. He tosses in an asthma inhaler and a box of ciprofloxacin, the powerful antibiotic popular with bioweapon-fearing Americans.