Scaling the Scientific Eigernordwand

Last week, eight of us were sitting around in a brew pub between two days of very tedious meetings. Somebody mentioned the recent promotion of an individual to a very senior scientific position in The Company. Three of the group were amazed that such an individual could had risen to such an exalted position while none of the remaining four members of the party had actually heard of the individual in question.

If you’ve worked in a pharmaceutical company, you may have occasionally encountered individuals like the one we’re talking about. They’ll have the ear of Upper Management and a grand job title that suggests that they are amongst The Company’s scientific elite. Their scientific prowess will be trumpeted in The Company Pravda and there will be pictures and videos of them hobnobbing with Upper Management and important visitors like Key Opinion Leaders. Upper Management will describe them as visionary, pre-eminent drug hunters and exceptional role models for The Great Unwashed who occupy the lower strata of the food chain.

So how did this scientific elite come to be? The quick answer is in a variety of ways. They may have got in at the start and as the company grew they just kept moving up. Sometimes it’s simply a case of diversity-driven career progression although, thankfully, this is rare. More likely, they got there because in Pharma, Upper Management need tame scientists to help them maintain the illusion that they care deeply about and are intimately involved in the science of drug discovery.

The most important thing to remember about members of this elite group is that they are there because Upper Management says that they are the best scientists. They have not got to the top by being negative and saying that drug discovery is a difficult and unpredictable business. In time they become an integral part of the management structure. Upper Management has a potential problem with how to distinguish these individuals from The Great Unwashed. However, this problem is easily solved by noting that Upper Management are important people and that advising important people is important work. Such important work that the people doing it need to be promoted to levels that are completely inaccessible to The Great Unwashed.

The existence of this scientific elite makes for some interesting political activity within Big Pharma organizations. Suppose you’re running an established pharmacokinetics department that is seen as less dynamic and energetic than the anti-viral task force set up a year ago. One way to make your tired department look more dynamic and energetic is to find somebody that you can get away with promoting to Senior Pharma Fellow (SPF). This is also a good time to call in some favours from your buddies in academia. Can they create an important-sounding visiting professorship for your SPF at their institution? Maybe invite him to give some lectures at their university? And of course we’ll provide the funding for that post-doc that you’ve been gagging for…

So you’ve wrong-footed your anti-viral opponents. Well done! Their task force may be bursting at the seams with bright, energetic, thrusting individuals who were the best post-docs in the best groups in the best universities. The best and the brightest one might say but you’re the one with the SPF. However, don’t stop now because there’s still work to do. You need to get your SPF on to the Research Coordination Committee (RCC). That sounds difficult! How do we do that? Trivial problem! Just tell the chinless wonders who decide who sits on the RCC that he’s an SPF and it’ll happen. They’ll have even less of a clue about your SPF’s scientific limitations than your anti-viral opponents. If anybody asks awkward questions, just remind them that the appointment of an SPF is rubber-stamped (better to say ‘authorised’ though) at the highest level in the organisation. Now there’s one more thing that you’ve got to do. Get SPF onto an external committee where he’ll be able to review grant proposals and really put the screws on those tiresome academics. Excellent work! Now you don’t need to feel guilty about that conference in Cancun at which you’ll be doing an undemanding general overview of pharmacokinetics to help out your old university buddy who is chairing a session...

Welcome back from Cancun. We hope you had a great trip, free of Montezuma’s Revenge or the Inca Quickstep. We don t want to alarm you but a couple of problems cropped up with SPF while you were away. Turns out SPF decided to update the department on his global vision for the future of pharmacokinetics. Trouble is that he got a bit carried away with his optimistic view of the state of the art of human dose prediction and some smart ass exposed a rather rudimentary understanding of allometric scaling…

Shit!

And that’s not all. Last week, he set up a meeting with the folk working on transporters, made a couple of vapid comments on their results and now thinks he should be on the paper that they’re writing with their academic collaborator.

Shit! I go off to Cancun for two weeks and come back to this! How could you let it happen?

Don’t blame us, we only write The Crapshoot. And please don’t swear. You'll have to talk to him yourself. Be firm like you’re house-training a puppy that keeps pissing on the floor. Here’s what you’ve got to say:

You imbecile! I go to Cancun for two weeks and I come back to this! I didn’t make you an SPF because you’re a good scientist. I made you an SPF because this department is crap and all the other departments know we’re crap. If we have our own SPF, the head of research and the other departments might think we’re less crap than they do now. Your job is not to provide leadership for the scientists or anybody else in this department. You are now in management although you will have no power. Your job is to present anodyne graphics with lots of metrics to the fuckwits who have the power to cut my budget. Just like how they do the weather on TV. Why the sour face? Try smiling instead of looking like you’re sucking a lemon. Get a synchronised swimming DVD if you don’t know how and while you’re at it learn how to use an autocue! Now I don’t want any of this visionary, pre-eminent bullshit going to your head. We had to say it otherwise we couldn’t have justified your promotion to those meddlesome, opinionated cretins in Human Resources. Also I don’t want you talking to our scientists any more and don’t even think of talking to those bastards in the anti-viral task force. If you want to write papers, there are plenty of lightly-refereed journals that you can do reviews for. Maybe we can even get you on the editorial board of one or perhaps a monthly column.

That’s all for now, folks. Please stay tuned for the next instalment.

Any similarity between the characters in this Crapshoot and real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No animals, children, managers or Senior Pharma Fellows were harmed in the preparation of this Crapshoot.