05 December 2014

A Giant Sick Koala

GlaxoSmithKline is a drug company that Wall Street hates. I don't follow it, except the occasional piece that appears in places I usually visit. One such piece is from the prolific Dana Blankenhorn.

The only reason I bother to mention it is his following observation:
[Dr. Moncef Slaoui, then the company's head of research and development] said that researchers should "gamble their careers" on the drugs they worked on.

This sounds good, if you don't know science, or scientists. Because scientists don't get into science for ROI. They don't get into science to "gamble their careers" on a clinical trial. They go into science to do science. They go into science to learn things, to discover things, to help mankind. What Slaoui wound up with, instead of a bunch of entrepreneurial scientists, was a bunch of backstabbing neurotics.
[my emphasis]

Sound like a recent musing? Yes, yes it does.

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