Looking beyond the spin of Big Pharma PR. But encouraging gossip. Come in and confide, you know you want to! “I’ll publish right or wrong. Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.”
Email: jackfriday2011(at)hotmail.co.uk
Monday, October 12, 2009
Big banks, big pharma, big problems - by John Martin, professor of cardiovascular medicine at University College London
The running of large pharmaceutical companies carries a social responsibility that is as heavy as running any bank. Recently, however, this unwritten contract between society and drug companies has not been fulfilled. Is our health now too important to be left to big pharma?
It probably is too important, based upon how the industry now conducts itself: rampant talent mismanagement, questionable ethics and outright incompetence being just a few of the ills.
Or, perhaps more accurately, a large marketing industry with poor ethics and a busywork section disguised to look like R&D. As a colleague noted in my post "Pfizer/Wyeth Merger And Sacrificing The Future: Laying Off Scientific Staff All Over The Place" here, a small fraction of prime scientist intellectual horsepower and time is actually spent on true R&D today, the rest wasted on feeding the bureaucratic corpulence that is the modern pharma research lab.
He observed that "what we today call pharmaceutical R&D is in reality busywork disguised to look like R&D, in effect a well engineered, well managed, massively expensive failure.")
Pharma as it is structured today needs a vast rethinking.
1 comment:
John Martin wrote:
The running of large pharmaceutical companies carries a social responsibility that is as heavy as running any bank. Recently, however, this unwritten contract between society and drug companies has not been fulfilled. Is our health now too important to be left to big pharma?
It probably is too important, based upon how the industry now conducts itself: rampant talent mismanagement, questionable ethics and outright incompetence being just a few of the ills.
As I wrote at Healthcare Renewal at my post "Wyeth, Ghostwriting, Dr. Joseph Camardo and a Big Liquor Store With a Little Grocery Department", pharma has largely turned from what used to be a biomedical research & development industry with good core ethics and a small marketing arm, to large marketing industry with poor ethics and a small R&D arm.
Or, perhaps more accurately, a large marketing industry with poor ethics and a busywork section disguised to look like R&D. As a colleague noted in my post "Pfizer/Wyeth Merger And Sacrificing The Future: Laying Off Scientific Staff All Over The Place" here, a small fraction of prime scientist intellectual horsepower and time is actually spent on true R&D today, the rest wasted on feeding the bureaucratic corpulence that is the modern pharma research lab.
He observed that "what we today call pharmaceutical R&D is in reality busywork disguised to look like R&D, in effect a well engineered, well managed, massively expensive failure.")
Pharma as it is structured today needs a vast rethinking.
-- MedInformaticsMD
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