Downsizing Trend Leaves Pharma Without the Kinds of Employees It Needs: By Daniel Hoffman, PhD and president of Pharmaceutical Business Research Associates
In addition to disrupting tens of thousands of lives, the substantial downsizing in pharma over the past two-and-a-half years has changed many companies for the worse. I previously wrote that the guidelines handed down from finance to HR have eliminated many of the more knowledgeable and experienced people at each layoff round because people over age 50 are among the first targets for separation packages. But the dysfunctional legacy is even more pernicious. The resulting culture has created a workforce that is almost entirely at odds with what pharma needs now.
The challenges facing pharma today go beyond the global recession and the dearth of new product development. The widespread changes to the industry’s customer base, the declining willingness of payers to reimburse me-too products, pharma’s poor public image, and increasing constraints on the ability to differentiate its products have all contributed to a situation where the entire business model has become obsolete. In such a situation, pharma needs innovative, risk-taking people at all levels across the operations spectrum.
A wide range of advertising gurus, global consultants and self-styled wise men has offered "new paradigmatic approaches," most of which amount to hollow ambiguities. Their suggestions include admonitions to “listen to your customers” and “lose the obsessive control over messaging,” as well as an array of familiar tactics under new-fangled names. The fact that most of these "new path" suggestions come from large suppliers who are part of the Old Boys club should indicate their worthlessness. The truly necessary reconsiderations, such as how pharma companies can generate a return on capital in the new environment, would likely consign these "preferred," "value preferred" and "agency of record" suppliers to the recycling bin.
The problem is that the dishonest and unfair approaches the industry has taken to downsizing have left it with many people who are small-minded, politically savvy and safe playing. Gone are the people who acquired the experience to know what doesn't work after enduring years of self-serving platitudes. Those with sufficient boldness to try something outside the conventional axioms now spend their mornings expanding their Linkedin contacts.
Many of the people remaining in operations deliberately choose not to ask big or important questions, lest their colleagues perceive any fundamental doubt as a threat. The truly adept manage to avoid taking a position on even the most mundane matters, lest someone else equate perceptive questions with disloyalty. Some even find it wise to feign ignorance concerning the elephants in various rooms. The combination of such simulated ignorance, together with the genuine version among the inexperienced survivors, makes the task of determining the smartest guy in the room a purely theoretical exercise.
Of course the approach of making oneself unthreatening, wholly agreeable, blind, deaf and dumb has its limits, too. An operations manager who adopts the cheerful, compliant pose of a good administrative assistant will eventually find that he can be replaced with the real thing at less than half the salary.
Two functions bear the major responsibility for enforcing a culture of deliberate mindlessness. At the top, finance sets the strategic direction. The goal of finance, paramount to everything else, consists of keeping senior management in control of the company. Forget the blather about shareholder value, customers, the community and medicine for the people. Everyone outside the boardroom is the enemy.
To that end, finance seeks to propitiate the short-term interests of shareholders, i.e., Wall Street. They accomplish this by means such as cutting R&D, marketing and other expenses, and then using some of the money to buy off shareholders with dividends and share buy-backs. On the rare occasions when one mentions to a CFO that R&D and marketing define branded pharma, and stinting on those operations will spell its doom, a few may even admit as much during a rare moment of candor. Any such acknowledgement, however, is quickly followed by an impatient effort to "explain the realities."
Reality for CFOs involves long-term product and business development approaches that would create several quarters of flat or negative earnings. In their doomsday scenario, that would prompt the board to replace management. If one responds by noting that a management change remains unlikely because most boards consist of cronies and pets, the long-term approach still holds no appeal for CFOs. With a dismissive waive of the hand they claim that a hedge fund would then swoop down and "take the company away from us."
On the more tactical and micro level, lawyers and their minions in compliance boldly suppress innovation and critical thinking. That is because the legal counsel's number one goal consists of keeping the fiduciary officers away from the deposition table and off the witness stand, where they run the risk of an aggressive litigator pulling down their pants in open court. The fines and civil settlements mean little to these advocates for senior management because shareholders pay those anyway. Some top execs even get bigger compensation packages after the company pays substantial, nine-figure settlements. No, the danger lies with some CEO offering sworn testimony that shows him to be a sleazy dirtbag. In the internet age, his fellows at the country club and his wife's friends could then read the transcript and, as The Godfather character that awoke with a horse's head beside him said, someone in that position can't afford to look ridiculous.
So legal counsel and/or compliance draft and vet every position paper and serve as first among equals on every operating committee. The resulting product consists of typically ambiguous, self-contradictory bombast involving the use of twelve different euphemisms for "layoffs" in a single memo.
If insight and experience can jeopardize earnings and raise liability exposure, the pharmas increasingly seek other qualities in their employees. Many operations directors, knowing full well the shackles in which they must operate, esteem loyalty above all else. Doubt, disagreement and critical thinking among subordinates create weak points that competing directors within the company can exploit. Besides, many operations leaders believe these individual qualities are obsolete anyway, given that "strategic partners" - the 2009-10 buzz term for sole-source suppliers - now perform so much of the work.
Use of the term "partner" for these volume discount arrangements is actually quite misleading because the supplier receives nothing from the pharma other than fees for services, unless one argues that the ability to say that "We're a one-stop shop for Pfizer" provides an advantage for selling to other clients. In any case, the relationship further increases the company manager's similarity to an admin.
So in the end, few people in senior and middle management want to make the sorts of changes pharma needs. Fewer still appear capable of doing so even if the inclination came upon them. For example, the reflexes developed from detailing physicians in onesie-twosie practices appear poorly suited for reckoning with a 2,300-physician practice chain that a major insurer will soon own.
The Greek engineer Archimedes once famously said that he could move the world if he were given a place to stand. Pharma requires some substantial movement but any insider pushing on a lever to make changes would likely find himself and his tools sinking into mush.
58 Comments
Excellent article Ed. I have been saying the exact same thing on my website as I have seen some very talented marketers leave pharma because they have had enough. What is driving them out is not the FDA or DDMAC it's the managers at pharma who refuse to take risks and do what they know is best for patients and customers. It's managers that are way too interested in their own political status within the organization than becoming marketing Linchpins.
Perhaps nothing has done more damage to the pharma talent pool than 360 degree reviews where people need to ensure that they get along with everyone rather than do what they feel is right and matrix organizations where everyone puts their personal interests above transparency and doing what is best for customers. The lifeguard has left the talent pool
Terrific article that is also right on the money! Any one and everyone who have been impacted by this "madness" can in some (or many) way relate to this article. I opine that none of the issues that have been raised herein will matter as some more cutbacks are still in the store, given the reality (economics, patent expiry, politics etc.). I feel that most experienced one were let go and the freshly minted graduates are taking their place, but who will guide them? The wisdom of the experienced one will be sorely missed.
The more "marketers" big pharma kicks a*s, he better. The times of purely marketing-driven pharma are over, definitely.
Bitter - party of one. Your table is ready.
The comment by saavysurvivor is frightening, isn't it?
What foundation does it rest on? What were these graduates educated to do? What will future graduates be educated to do once the *survivors* have total control of the levers of power over the health of the human species?
If competition is what drives *free market* capitalism, then it's a no-brainer - get the ethical and experienced 50 somethings into a own newly-formed company.
Bitter has nothing to do with it. Wake up and smell the coffee. Do you think that J&J would be in all the trouble they're in if this weren't true??
Excellent article with an accurate explananton as to what is going on. Actually if you rock the boat and mentiuon something is illegal you can count on getting fired or harassed to death. Of course nothing happens to the person doing or trainng all the illegal activity and the share holders to pay the fine. It is all about loyalty under any conditions even breaking the laws of the USA. I thought we were AMercians before we were crooks working for these ass's. THe reps just laugh and do what they are told knowing nothing much can happen if management told them to do it. I think Pharma had already screwed themselves when people like Kindler decided to laugh at the law. I don't see how they still have their law licenses most of his cronies are still working for Pfizer like TR Kelly, Franchini and Diaco. Not mcuh is changing if the legal officers can break the law all the time and get away with it. THese new SEC regulations shuld make it more interesting for lawyers breaking the law all the time.
Mr. Hoffman, I salute you.
What industry needs is more people like you and others (and there aren't many) who point to the elephant in the room and say "look, there is an elephant in the room."
Thank you sir, and well said.
Pretty much agree with company insider. The Big Pharma R%D innovation machine mindset was humming back in 1983 when I broke in. My first boss actually wrote the SOP's for our department, but told me frankly that if he had to follow his own SOP's he would never get his job done in the way it needed to be done. I took that as a signal that risk taking was to be encouraged, which it indeed was. Twenty-eight years later the mindset is the reverse: break one of those SOP's, no matter how small and you may not get fired but your career will be headed straight for the company boneyard.
Excellent Op-Ed. It is now a vicious circle. The people in charge only want to be told what they want to hear and the people in the trenches can only speak platitudes or hit the unemployment line. (which they may end up hitting anyway) It will get sorted out by the consumer in the end but it will be very painful during the interim - my prediction at least 5 years. I see no market rebound in my crystal ball because the model has to change first.
@Karl in FL - perfect example - J & J. Company could turn around on a dime - ESPECIALLY the manufacturing sector - if you get everyone back in there who knows how to do the job. Reading what keeps going wrong there is surreal - how could those things be going wrong - now - when it's over a century since that problem was solved!!
As for research, a common complaint from the 50 something crowd is about how close they were, in many cases, to real progress and breakthroughs - and all point to the one *bad apple* that got embedded into the project. The *bad apple* was not a colorful, authentic and unique personality - the *bad apple* was the back stabbing politician with no loyalty to the work itself, just their own ego.
That's what they care about the most - the unemployed - not being able to continue to do the research work just as they were getting somewhere good. It's not about the *job*, per se....
They even try to track what happened to the project/direction they were going - did someone else pick up the path? God bless USA - a new company can be formed to do the good work....trust no one under 50 :-)
Sure would like to hear from the students carrying huge loans on their science and med degrees about the business *model* that gets rid of experienced people faster and faster so no one has more experience than the boss who may only have 5 years - looks like medical research will never be a secure enough *job* to ever pay back that loan...
The best and the brightest left Big Pharma starting three decades with the dawn of the biotechnology era. Of course I include myself in this crowd, although I was somewhat of a late comer. In 2000 I went from a company of 100,000 to a start up company of 5, and I was the fifth hire. With $50,000,000 in initial private equity financing we sold the company to a Big Pharma company in 2007 for $700,000,000. The rest, as they say is history.
Don't let that student debt overhang prevent you from going after what you want. Otherwise you will regret it the rest of your life. You may not make out like the Boomers financially, but there is no substitute for loving what you do. In fact I never really considered my work to be a "job". Students can still do serious career planning, maybe with a few more stops along the way, but dont listen to those who tell you that your life will be an endless series of miserable low wage jobs.
Perhaps it is worse, but the "savvy survivor" approach has been a central part of corporate culture since at least the late 70s. Read the various "handbooks" that have proliferated since then, many of which are titled "How to Survivor...." your boss, your job, your company, your co-workers.
During the period of "downsizing," parallel to know, "how to survive" was pretty much all we heard. And it was not about taking risks or standing on principle.
Plus ca change...
Regrettably all true.... Hindsight is perfect.
The point is historical perspective.
For example, is it true that, during the "golden years" of pharma, there were truly fewer "survivalists"? Has there been that much change, particularly in the big companies, since the 70s?
Or is this thread about nostalgia for a past that mostly never was--over the past 40 years?
For example, is it true that, during the “golden years” of pharma, there were truly fewer “survivalists”?
Hmmm... tough one to answer on an empirical basis.
The Pfortune piece on Pfizer a few months ago contained (near the beginning) an (incomplete) assessment of who was running that company in a historical sense. "Who" defined by educational background and experience. Fewer pharma scientists and more people from legal and business backgrounds. The same analysis and argument has been made elsewhere. http://www.eyesopen.com/en/blog/what-is-really-killing-pharma One can argue that there has been a change in traits needed to find one's way to the boardroom, and that those traits valued in the boardroom become valued w/in the company overall. There's little hard data allowing one to narrow down from the general descriptor "different traits" to the particular descriptor "survivalist" traits. There is only the soft assessment of the nature of pursuing research for its own sake vs the culture of big money legal and business. It is clear which of those does more to foster the idea and practice of exchanging truth for coming out on top?
I would agree that there is almost always some nostalgia for the past - in any setting. This is human nature, but does not necessarily mean that all such nostalgia is unwarranted. We may never know for sure, but we know what today's conventional wisdom says about the matter.
Brilliant, and spot on. Should be required reading for all CEOs and big pharma board members. So life-like that I can put names on the archetypes profiled in the column. Thank you for a concise summary of what is precipitating the demise of a once-great industry.
Thanks for the captivating summary of "how did we get here"? Real learning comes from the lessons of the past; both the good and bad.
I have to ask; do we have 10 years or experience? or 1 year - repeated 10 times?
Mssrs. Wallace Abbott, George Merck, Eli Lilly,and Charles Pfizer were chemists, not lawyers, MBA's or accounatnts. That tells me a lot about where this industry has gone. There are no more Dr. P Roy Vagelos' of the world, brilliant physician/scientist/businesmen who can steer us out of this mess.
One of the best, most accurate reviews of current pharma world I've ever read.
4: Bitterness is only unnecessary when it is unwarranted, when the bitterness is derived from unwarranted or unreasonable assumptions rather than from an actual betrayal.
Upper management in drug companies has destroyed the work of decades for short-term profits (much of which they received), made others pay for their mistakes repeatedly while they avoid blame and persist like kudzu or mold. They have helped to make sure that the drugs needed in the future will not likely exist, that the people who could have found them will be any position to do so, and that doing useful work (the kind that used to characterize the US) will be deprecated and penalized.
Layoffs always tend to lead to bitterness and anger, particularly when the consequences are dire, even when they might be the right thing to do. In this case, layoffs did not make the companies better or stronger, but benefited a few to the exclusion of pretty much everyone else. (The word "kleptocracy" come to mind.) The circumstances seem like a reasonable cause for bitterness to me.
@Mike S - thanks for the great link and the thoughtful social engineering question that went along with it.
From the article, "One consequence of this shift from science to business in the pharma industry has been less and less appreciation for the realities—as opposed to the hype and hope—of drug discovery. This is reflected both in the quixotic choices made by pharma as to what to pursue and in the stunningly bad management of the core talent in drug discovery."
I think the answer might be found in understanding the cult behind the "quixotic choices". That is a HUGE story that data managers not suffering from "attention to detail" disorder who were invisible to upper management making those choices can tell one day. Maybe even provide data that was not cherry-picked for publication by the conspiracy in place to enter patient data manufactured to fit the theory - you know, the *test database* was statistically analyzed (by mistake, like all great discoveries) and found to be useful ambiguity....HUGE story - ending with a connection to credit default swaps. No kidding. OII hopefully spit out his coffee on the screen reading this...
A decade ago, a decent handful of surgeons - specialists in bone marrow transplants - knew what they wanted to do next in the chemotherapy cycle. They agreed it could be done. They knew it was going to be hard to do because of the collaboration between at least 7 cross-discipline science specialties. BTW, no one working on this ever even thought one nanosecond about the *finance* requirements - shoot, you would expect that surgeons know USA has a fiat money supply so for them that's a detail for accountants to build the flow of capital needed - but later, of course - NOT UP FRONT. :-) Apologies for the *strong* emphasis....
Trying to apply CPR to that idea (what surgeons wanted to do after the BM transplant) at a job interview where I was fishing for info more than being actually serious about wanting to make sense out of un-monitor-ed lab data for a *director* with such a severe case of "attention to detail disorder*, that she got brain lock at the disorder and needed someone to do just that - for years - without ever being able to step up and say this data should be verified as *real*...
Anyway, the last person sent in the room was much closer to the the PTB, and was willing to at least discuss the therapy advance envisioned by the surgeons a decade ago. He pretty much took the tack of - heard that before - but then kept fishing for more - so I gave enough to make sure he understood correctly - at which point he observed that "that's hard to do" - again never saying it could not be done.
It's ridiculous to have SO many experienced medical researchers put on some stalin-list for economic elimination to feed the "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" beasts. That 1.1 billion that went to the Brookings Institute - they're not doing something "hard to do" by trolling data through some programmed software looking for a clue for a cure. That data is crap - you do not need 1.1 billion to figure that out - scheesh.
Based on technical medical advances that have been made in the battlefield during this past decade of war, it will still be *hard to do*, but less so because operations people had to have gotten the right coordination among disciplines in order to achieve their great triage results - probably because no one crunched the numbers up front before they were allowed to find a way to do the job.
Supposedly, 700,000 engineers got to work on the moon landing. Put together the over-50 crowd and back on the projects that were *too hard* to do...
Saving the art of medical research here, not the art of fraud....seems there's finally a real quorum that's ready for the battle...good news indeed!
Amazing what you find when you investigate upstream of the water source :-))
@dzieczko - Your post stimulated another thought. Isn't this same disease what killed the Detroit automakers when the Whiz-Kids took over, and cars became "units"?
@Karl in FL and this is the same road that education is going down in the US. What a scary thought!
Your article is spot on. All of the "robo reps" are now running the shop. No creative thinking. No critical thinking. Just hire ZS Associates to tell you who to call on, who not to, and make 8-10 calls per day. Mindless drones. If pharma wants to survive, it must get away from a call per day metric (as if running around collecting signatures amounts high quality calls and moving any business...does this work for IT reps?) and be 100% account based; 1 talented, clinically solid rep to manage a territory.
Boohooh ..those greedy McKinsey guys that get all the contracts and leave nothing for my little consulting shop...boh hoohoo ..and I am the only one that knows pharma...bad bad management..give me a couple millions of engaments every year and I will not cry anymore about "strategic Partners"...
Karl, if you accept the idea that industries, like drugs have their own life cycles, then US Pharma is a mature industry identical to where Big Auto in Detroit was a few years ago. Big Auto, with a bailout along the way, reinvented itself and figured out along how it could miniaturize itself and still be profitable. Big Pharma will have to do the same, only it won't get any outside help.
If this is accurate and pharma is driving itself into the ground then why isn't anyone doing the opposite of what is described here and succeeding? Seems like it would be an opportunity.
MC RPh
Many people would love to try, me included. The barrier is cost to entry. It's not like guys like us can set up shops in our garages.
Agreed MedChem, but looking at how much money there is to be made I find it surprising that there is no venture capital anywhere? It would certainly validate what is written above.
MC RPh: I prefer to Call them "vulture capitalists". I went to a recent ACS presentation about start up companies. Vulture capitalists these days are very picky. That's because pharma is very high risk, takes.a long time and 80% of such ventures fail. For me to start my own company, I could do the design work but I'd have to have the money to order compounds it have them made. I'd have to find companies to do screening, other people to do secondary assays, in vivo assays, analytical work, ADME profiles. And from what I've been told, vulture capitalists will want to see a lot of that up front before they invest a penny. They're not very adventurous these days. If you do manage to fund yourself for years while you burn though your kids' college funds, vulture capitalists will want you to sign agreements where you will turn over a huge amount of future profits. For all your work, they make out like bandits if the drug hits big while you may get a couple hundred thousand a year for all your work. Granted, it would be nice to kick back on $300,000 a year for as long as the good times roll. But it would burn my oatmeal if I put in that much work and someone else took the big bucks because they made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
As to the rant, my own layoff came as a total shock to me. I was in a small group that was overwhelmed with work that was cut by 40%. The people who managed to stay were the biggest ass kissers and political types you'd ever want to meet. They were more senior as well. In my company, most of the junior people and hands on people were cut. The ones who remain have to retrain themselves to do the work we left behind. Years of paperwork have left them stale in terms of using the software and working in the lab.
I will probably never find a job in this business again. I loved my job and miss it every day. My severance is almost up, my kid is in high school and my mortgage has to be paid in this high cost of living state where big pharma has stranded me after it went looking for get rich quick schemes in Massachusetts. All of my friends are in the same boat. Overeducated, underemployed and broke.
Portia.vz "The people who managed to stay were the biggest ass kissers and political types you’d ever want to meet. They were more senior as well. "
Same at my company. Sadly, these peole are the ultimate survivors. A golden tongue and smart politics always rule the day.
Portia I empathize with you. When I joined a start up company funded by private equity in 2000 the tag line was that all you needed to get VC money was a few lab monkeys, a half baked business plan, a nice suit and a snazzy powerpoint presentation. Within two years that money had basically dried up. Only late stage VC funded projects are being funded for the most part today, where there is promise of an approvable drug.
The three big risks that VC guys have to consider today weren't always as severe, and are:
1)Development risk. That has always been there;
2)Regulatory risk. FDA has gone risk averse and that's a HUGE change.
3)Commercialization risk. The VC guys won't give you money if they think that risks 1 and 2 are too high, which is much the case today vs 11 years ago when I got in the game.
I appreciate Mike S's comment above.
As an Orignal Industry Outsider, but one who knows a fair number of insiders who have been there over the past 40 years, my own sense remains that the impact of the changes in management style and background--which everyone speaks of endlessly--has meant less than purported.
If you go back to the 60s and 70s--the days of thalidomide, Hubert Humphrey's outrage, the Kennedy investigations of the 70s--much more looks the same than different over the past 40 years.
Convenient as it is to blame things on those survialist/marketeer types--and recalling the supposed superiority of an era when scientists ruled the roost--I don't think the analysis takes us too far.
For anyone who wants a specific example, take a close look at Ed Scolnick's role during the Vioxx saga. While greed my drive the marketeers, and "beating Celebrex" may drive the science chief, are the results for an orgranization's ethics culture very different?
Justice in MI: Regulatory hurdles Have been raised so high that virtually nothing gets approved anymore. Couldn't get aspirin approved in this environment. Gastric bleeding? Reyes syndrome? Are you kidding me? Back in the day when everyone was chasing a Cox-2 inhibitor, that was supposed to be an improvement. And for some people with rheumatoid arthritis, it was. Then the class action suits came and bye-bye pain relief. I knew someone who was on one. She said she could finally move without pain. And then it was gone. Nobody asked her if she wanted to take the risk. I don't know one single person in all my years of pharma who ever wanted to push a dangerous drug on patients. We're not all Simon Barsinisters. but I suspect that the legal industry has a big stake in making sure the public sees us that way. Sometimes, we're designing in the dark or think we know what's happening until the cell shows us just how complex it really is. It's a shame that some people have figured out how to capitalize on those uncertainties and come out smelling like a rose while patients suffer and consumers' choice of medications dwindles and corporate labs cancel projects on the slightest hint of an issue that may or may not be real. You have to live with the decisions you make. I can sleep untroubled by the things I did in the lab.
I agree in part with Justice. If you look at the history of the industry, amphetamines, barbituates, first generation antipsychotics, thalidomide, and a host of other drugs were rushed to the market without adequate safety testing and over-promoted to an extraordinary extent. The industry has not changed so much as society's willingness to accept this behavior.
On the other hand, I don't think that people within the industry as a group are any less ethical than members of the medical profession, academics, or those who work in unrelated industries. Its a lot easier and more cost effective to investigate off label promotion of a single billion dollar drug than it is to run down fraudulent billing and unnecessary surgeries in a a thousand $1M per year medical practices.
Having sat through my fair share of sales, marketing, medical and sales admin meetings over the years, I can count on one finger the number of pharma "big wigs" that place patient well being over bottom line profits. I have seen that one person summarily dismissed and forced out of the organization.
We all know it is a business and profits are necessary, but those that run these corporations have priorities backwards and the last decade or two have made it clear to the public. Pharma's reputation is well deserved, untrustworthy and self centered above patients.
Are there some exceptions? Maybe a few.
Well, Doc, I'm sorry you feel that way. I've certainly met my fair share of decent, concerned people in my own profession as well as in yours. I've also run into quite a few of the other kind in both places. The main difference that I've seen is that people in your profession drive nicer cars. :>)
Portia (interesting name choice)==I am not a lawyer, btw, greedy, blood-sucking, or otherwise.
Re: your comment, "I don’t know one single person in all my years of pharma who ever wanted to push a dangerous drug on patients."
If, by that, you mean that it never happens that concerns about sales has never trumped appropriate concern about red flags, not burying studies, not intimidating investigators or bribing them, not spinning data, not minimizing known risk....
Your are either being disingenuous or have been working in a closet somewhere.
I am one who does not demonize the industy. It is about as mixed, ethically, as every other business, and better than many (including academia). If you feel the need to demonize lawyers in order to preserve/perpetrate a fantasy though, I've got a lot of internal documents (that have been made public over the years) that you'll not want to read.
Somehow I think that Portia and Justice are not quite speaking about the same thing.
As "The QA Pharm" blog repeatedly points out, what is needed today is a return to a patient-centered approach to pharmaceutical development and manufacturing. The patient is ultimate customer, even if the patient does not make the choice.
It seems to me that Portia's world is one where her interest is in developing products that will help patients. I'd bet that she works as a bench chemist or directly supervises them. In this place, it is not disingenuous, but may be somewhat closeted. What's wrong with having ideals?
Let's go back to Dan's original point - and that is that the Portia's in this world, who love their science, and want the science to be good and right, are the ones being shown the door. The brain drain being foisted on pharma companies by their management is counter-productive. Who's going to do the work??
Point well taken, Karl.
I know a lot of bench scientists, and they are as you describe. But they do not generally name lawyers ("Simon Barsinisters") or regulatory hurdles as the primary reasons that plugs get pulled. Note that FDA left the door open about Vioxx returning to the market. It was Merck that decided that those pts willing to take the risk would not have the option to do so.
Going back up the thread, the people I know mainly blame business model, the elephantine size of big companies and their general risk-aversion for many reasons, the emphasis on blockbusters, etc.
The must fulfilled Portia's I know are those who have found their way to smaller companies where people know each other and know what each other is doing. In those environments, innovation still thrives.
I'm definitely for ideals. We (including Portia and I) should assume we all have them until proven otherwise!
@OII - unless the plan is to turn a cow into a jet plane, you can't apply the same cash flow process to two such wildly different industries! Plus, airlines are owned by the employees, and auto workers were also unionized. Tougher PUBLIC battle there, wasn't it? Detroit real estate definitely looks like post WWII London - only a few building standing.
@Portia - I am truly sorry to hear about the situation you are in. I'll save you the scientific research time you would have to spend, as an ethical scientist and not as a embedded political wonk, in tracking the connections between the *vulture capitalists* on down the food chain to the *maggot capitalists* that you were systematically fed to - stalin-list style. There is a bona-fide *cult* doing all this *cost cutting* - they are the *eugenicists* of WWII fame. They counted on you having your nose dutifully buried in the microscope in the lab while they had your financial life under their *microscope*. Patriot Act granted the Secretary of the Treasury the rights to all people's financial records - read today's NY Times. War Lords are after your savings and real estate as part of their war booty...but I digress.
@Karl - Thanks for keeping focus. The issue, indeed, is the future of medical research. If it has no chance of being done inside big pharma, then where? If pharma got rid of everybody who was sincere, experienced, and STRONGLY brilliant - genetically, no? - (and econ-polcon bloggers are calling people like Portia *stupid*), then they also got rid of how ethical medical research SHOULD be conducted. Where's the institution, now, and in the future, that will provide economic protection and resources for ethical medical research? Bunch of biotechs all telling Wall Street mongrols that they have the molecule to cure cancer isn't the answer, either - OII has shown us how he laundered big bucks through that *option*.
The very fact that age discrimination is being openly discussed without a peep from any enforcement of Labor laws, and the fact that there is, apparently, ZILCH understanding by *inwestors* in the possibilities of shareholder *profit* if they were to support with $$$ the experienced people deleted from pharma's payrolls to do the *too hard* research they were doing before being fed to the *maggot investor* chain
means we are in a unique situation as concerns the future of the human species.
We can still organize ourselves into a *research* corporation like the Brookings Institute Think Tank even though we got no chance at getting 1.1 billion to analyze un-monitored lab data :-))
Symbolic gestures do matter. They get things moving - 700,000 oars were pulling in the same direction to get to the moon...
dz I will agree with you to the extent that Big Pharma's resistance to unionization has put it in a better cash flow situation than Detroit, also with fewer obligations to retirees, which are now killing the USPS. I only meant to say that both industries were mature in that they lacked innovation, as most major decisions were made by committee.
Detroit is a shambles. I've been called cruel and inhuman for saying this, but the quickest way to restore property values in Detroit is for the banks to bulldoze all of the foreclosed properties that have become distressed. By lowering supply you artificially decrease the ratio of supply/demand, and thus bring supply and demand back into some kind of balabnce.
Terrific article, nice. Several small companies do the same tricks, once they got what they want, they will use the same phrase like downsizing, merger, focusing on clinical stage, closing down, etc.., I am today, and you will be tomorrow, never stops.
What if we bulldozed Bank of America/Countrywide first? Might save a lot of bulldoze fuel.
Much as you dislike banks, think of the Federal Reserve as the heart and the banks as the circulatory system that keeps the vital flow of oxygenated blood in the form of investment capital to business in order to grow our economy and reward entrepreneurs, risk takers and innovators who continue to make the US still the best place to do business. I go to conferences and frequently meet young entrepreneur MBA types who can't wait to get their careers going, and the flow of capital into their hands is the vital link between risk and reward, both to shareholders and stakeholders in this economy.
Call me old fashioned, but my economic hero, Lawrence Kudlow has said that "The American way of life is non-negotiable", and I believe that the viability of our banking system is crucial to making that statement true.
Again, OII, you're ADD-ing us...you opine, "I only meant to say that both industries were mature in that they lacked innovation, as most major decisions were made by committee."
And then you say, "I go to conferences and frequently meet young entrepreneur MBA types who can’t wait to get their careers going, and the flow of capital into their hands is the vital link between risk and reward, both to shareholders and stakeholders in this economy."
Aren't *shareholders* and *stakeholders* a *committee*?
And it's a good thing that medical researchers are easily disconnected from being a shareholder or a stakeholder in the health biz economy by being laid off in the thousands to create a perception that they lacked innovation?
Seneca the Younger (4 B.C - 65 A.D.) is credited with quipping, "Successful crime goes by the name of virtue."
Good article.
More proof - pharma is no longer capable of supplying the market between product rejections, consent decrees, and drug shortages.
It's like MacDonald's running out of hamburgers.
Pages