Experts and how to avoid them

Anyone who has worked for any length of time in the Pharmaceutical Industry will have encountered The Expert. Whether internal or external, The Expert can be defined as somebody who does not need to defend their opinion but merely needs to state it. We have fond memories of a charming and clever Ghanaian lady from our undergraduate days who pithily summarised An Expert as “somebody white a long way from home”.

So how do we end up with all these Experts? Firstly, a desire to be seen as An Expert, or even better, The Expert, is deeply rooted in the psyche of almost every professional scientist although the desire will remain unfulfilled for the vast majority even if they are unaware of this. This means that if An Expert is required there will be no shortage of volunteers. As we’ve mentioned before, the senior Pharma management (who prefer to call themselves Leaders, much to our amusement since Leadership implies Direction) just can’t handle multiple scientific opinions and find it much easier to disconnect their central nervous systems and find An Expert. It is this mental frailty of senior management that creates the intellectual vacuum in which both Senior Pharma Fellow and Pharma Fellow can thrive.

The basic problem with an Expert-based scientific culture is that it insulates top-level decision makers from scientific opinion. We have already discussed the emergence of professional Opinion-Havers in Pharma and how grumpy they get when any of the Great Unwashed dare to have an opinion. The other problem with professional Opinion-Havers is that they tend to be slow to change their opinions in response to new findings. This is partly due to innate psychology but it also reflects the dangers of changing one’s opinion. How can this be, M. le Crapshoot, surely the danger is in not changing one’s opinion in the light of new evidence? We admit that you may have a point, but the clear and present danger is that if an Opinion-Haver changes his or her opinion too often they risk fatiguing (and therefore ultimately losing the support of) the senior Pharma management who really want the science to be kept in nice, easily-digestible (just like baby food) sound-bites and bullet points. Suffice it to say the absolute worst thing that could happen to the professional Opinion-Haver is to be returned to the ranks of The Great Unwashed.

Just like a QSAR model, An Expert has a domain of applicability. Step outside that domain and the smooth rotation of fan blades is likely to be inhibited by the sudden adherence of a brown, viscous material that smells a whole lot like 3-methylindole. Again like a QSAR model, it’s not always obvious when The Expert has strayed outside his or her domain of applicability. Now you’ll be able to see the problem. You’re a senior manager in a large pharmaceutical company and you want to get a technical view on something that’s cropped up. What should you do? Don’t worry, just recycle one of the Experts you’ve already got and let somebody else worry about that tiresome domain of applicability stuff. There’re Experts after all so surely one of them can handle this...

Being An Expert has its benefits so there’s no shortage of people wanting to join this club. Some will simply say that they are Experts although this always makes us cringe because we regard stating that one is An Expert is the first step down an extremely slippery slope. However, it is instructive to see how many people claim to be Experts in their professional networking profiles. At least this is not as bad as claiming to be Visionary (yes, people really do put that in their profiles as well) which indicates that a prolonged course of strong pharmaceutical intervention is required.

We’re going to wrap things up there because writing this is just getting too depressing. On Monday we’re going to spend four hours with a particularly tedious academic who does natural product synthesis. He’s an old university buddy of our head of department who thinks that he will help us optimise CNS penetration. However, we spent a substantial portion of the previous meeting with him explaining why we were interested in the binding of our compounds to serum proteins such as albumin and are not optimistic that it’s going to be any better on Monday. Why can’t he just go and talk to Senior Pharma Fellow...

Any similarity between the characters in this Crapshoot and persons alive or dead is entirely coincidental. No children, animals, Experts, Pharma Fellows or Senior Pharma Fellows were harmed in the preparation of this Crapshoot.