What a perfect spring day it was

[Anonymous]

I thought to myself about 9:00 am, what a fine day. I'll bet all of those trees we have been planting look darn good on a day like this. So, I checked my calendar, made some changes, then took a little drive, then a little stroll.

And I said to myself, wow, this is arguably the best thing I have done for humanity in all my years at Lilly. Of course, my exact job function will not be revealed, but hey, it's all good.

 

[Anonymous]

Yes but what did you do to R&D An ideal drug company would follow all sorts of crazy ideas in early research, with the goal of selecting those where there was a high probability of believing they would actually prove effective in clinical development. It would bulk up on scientists, and try to limit the number of large clinical trials it conducted to those where some kind of test — blood levels of some protein, perhaps — led researchers to think they had a high probability of success. (Novartis, the most successful company in terms of getting new drugs to market, has moved in this direction.) But the tendency of the shutdowns has been to shut laboratories, too. Look at Merck’s stance toward the old Organon labs or Pfizer’s decision to shut the Michigan labs where Lipitor was invented. Taking the ax to the scientists is probably a mistake. --Forbes