Remember When?

Remember how we used to generate research reports?

"The scientist in a pharmaceutical company prepares his compound documents, using a variety of text and graphics systems, in a laborious cut-and-paste procedure, and transmits a hard copy to a records center, where photocopies and microforms are made and indexing takes place. When the end-user wants to retrieve his report, he asks an intermediary to do a search. The result will be a report number or access address. The hard-copy report then has to be manually retrieved, perhaps copied or printed, and delivered by mailman to the end-user. . . it is also evident that research end-users are not accessing full-text online databases to any large extent."

 - From J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci., 1991

It's truly amazing how quickly technology has accelerated online publication in the intervening two decades.

Public library lintel, USA

Update (Aug 3) - Derek Lowe weighs in:

@SeeArrOh Yep, that's how my continuation exam in grad school was done. Typewriter, plastic template, rub-on letters. Just before @Chemdraw.
— Derek Lowe (@Dereklowe) August 4, 2014

Topsy-Turvy Corporate Culture - From Tiny to Enormous

Let's face it: We humans are rubbish at logs.

I don't mean the huge cuts removed from tree stumps, but rather the mathematical powers of ten that scale up or down our everyday existence. N.dG.T. related a convincing illustration of our teensy experience relative to outer space in his first stint hosting Cosmos; here's another from the JLC archives.

Now, I've been working in pharma for some time, usually in tiny start-up companies with 10-100 people (log₁₀ = 1-2). Recently, I made the jump to "Megapharma," clocking in somewhere around 5 logs (To calibrate you, the total student population of UT-Austin is ~4.7 logs, and the population of Los Angeles is 6.6 logs). It's professionally equivalent to feeling like a single grain of salt in a heaping tablespoon.

And hey, this is only a two-log difference!

Not that I'm an introvert, either: I've been ENTJ for as long as I can remember. I'm perfectly fine with bustling parties (1.5 logs) or attending conferences with ~3. But this type of scale jump takes some adjustment. I find myself buried in organizational charts, figuring out exactly whose workflow covers my next project. I apologize when re-meeting people I've met two weeks before - just not enough space on the mental whiteboard for all the new names. Gone are the days when I could just poke my head in my colleague's lab to get a reagent, or speak directly to my company's founder. The enormities of scale preclude certain "normal" social interactions.

All this to say that my posting schedule will remain sparse until I wrap my brain fully around this new reality. It's not all bad news: Small sub-groups meet to offer community to new folks like me. Megapharma uses lots of ingenious workplace engineering to make the place seem smaller - potted plants, kitchenettes, warm colors, etc. After a little while, my brain will loosen and change, and you'll see floods of new posts about the joys of meetings (to plan other meetings) and #BigPharma life.

Oh...and more chemistry whimsy. Promise.

Who Gets Hired Where?

Not to steal Chemjobber's thunder, but I can't resist the question: Does anyone know a reliable data set for industrial chemistry hiring?

Taking my cue from Paul's incredibly exhaustive list of 2013 moves and hires in the academic world, I baited Twitter with the question. CJ opined immediately, with an apt football analogy:

Snerk. 

Dan weighed in with a tantalizing bon mot:

Is there a massive, unseen data set out there somewhere? [scratches chin, head...]

Straightaway, I can only think of LinkedIn, which suffers from being 1) voluntary, and 2) noisy data. Other sources might include faculty web pages (infrequently updated) or the C&EN Careers page (accurate, but limited). The ACS Employment and Salary Survey could track this, but I don't think it's granular down to the specific position and company. 

Readers: Does anyone know of a better way to collect this data? 

Update: CJ (correctly) points out that 'ACS Career Survey' isn't a real thing. Fixed, thanks!

A Jump to Conclusions...Based on Data?

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery recently released a spate of articles recapping the tumultuous past decade in drug development. 

I'd like to highlight a specific article, titled "From the Analyst's Couch - A Decade of Drug Discovery." Written by one John Arrowsmith (of Thomson-Reuters data-crunching fame), it shows how the major players in the pharma biz have juggled around in the past 10 years. Note Roche and Novartis' upward trend: from 2001-2011, Roche went from 10th to 5th in market cap, and Novartis from 5th to 3rd.

Source: Thomson Reuters

Not bad at all. Any specific reasons behind those climbs? First, Roche's acquisition of Genentech certainly helped them out, with less of the messy transitions of the Pfizer-Wyeth or Merck-Schering mergers. Second, look at the massive uptick in R&D spending by Roche (blue) and Novartis (pink) over the past decade! 

Unless I'm mistaken, I read both companies' spending as roughly quadrupling, from ~$2 billion to nearly $8-9ish billion over the past decade. Wow.

Note also that Pfizer, making double their Lipitor take from a decade past, still showed mostly flat investment in R&D from 2003-2009.

Page Two shows us a bar graph of the radical shift in therapeutic areas (this include all drugs from P1 -> NDA). 

Source: Thomson Reuters

Looks like cancer meds / pain / diabetes are WAY up, and cardiovascular is way down. 

Perhaps another sign of a graying population? Readers, what's your take?