Social Networking May be Hazardous to Your Career
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An article written by Kate Lorenz from CareerBuilder.com about the social networking phenomenon got me thinking. How many of you have a profile on MySpace or FaceBook or other social networking sites? I bet many! After all, everyone knows that it is cool and hip to have a profile on MySpace or FaceBook. But, perhaps more importantly, social networking profiles are a great way to meet and make new friends. That said, it is also a facile way for anyone with an internet connection to gain insight into your personal life whether you want them to or not.
Those of you who are old enough may remember a time when a good medicinal chemistry group was crucial to the success of any pharmaceutical company. For those of you who don’t know, the job of a medicinal chemist is to use traditional organic chemistry to create variants of promising lead compounds with the hope of identifying an NME with optimized therapeutic properties. Much of the art associated with medicinal chemistry was lost over the past decade because of the increased emphasis placed combinatorial chemistry. Not surprisingly, as the interest in combinatorial chemistry grew, there as a concomitant decrease in the number of medicinal chemistry jobs. Despite all of the hype and fanfare surrounding combinatorial chemistry, it has not delivered on its promise of creating “hundreds on new molecular entities each year”. Instead, combinatorial chemistry has just become another tool in the drug discovery and development armamentarium.
I think the old adage–“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”– is an apt description of the corporate culture that currently exists at Merck. Merck used to be one of the most emulated and lauded pharmaceutical companies in the world. It had an outstanding reputation for “doing good science” and many of its products were first in class and highly regarded. Then came the Vioxx debacle. Many analysts and pundits thought that the Vioxx controversy signaled the beginning of the end for Merck. However, much to everyone’s surprise, Merck was able to quickly recover from its Vioxx missteps (despite thousands of impending lawsuits) and the company’s stock price is the highest that it has been in 5 years. Nevertheless, the Vioxx scandal now appears to have been supplanted by another controversy; this time, over Gardasil, Merck’s recently approved cervical cancer vaccine. 
As many of you may know, I was, at one time in my career, a professional recruiter. I did not start my scientific career with the intension of becoming a headhunter –I sort of fell into it. While I was Chair of Biology at Middlesex County College I was asked by a recruiter to take a look at a Director-level job at a Boston-based biotechnology company. I went on a job interview but did not get an offer to join the company. However, I did strike up a “friendship” with the recruiter who brought the job opportunity to me. .jpg)
As you all know by now, Britney Spears shaved her head this past weekend. Yeah, WTF BFD, and who cares? Clearly, she has a drug problem and may be suffering from post-partum depression but so do millions of other people. The only newsworthy aspect of this spectacle is that people are actually bidding thousands (millions?) for her hair on E-bay (so the story goes). This is a very sad statement on our times. Foolish, wealthy individuals (with too much money on their hands) are willing to spend huge sums on the hair of a marginally-talented pop star while millions of people do not have adequate access to healthcare or life saving drugs. Maybe someone needs to tell these people that their money would be better spent on training future physicians and scientists rather than on the locks of an emotionally-troubled 24 year old pop star? 
Much has been written about the end of the “blockbuster” drug era in the pharmaceutical industry. For those of you who may not know what I am talking about, a blockbuster drug is one that yields a pharmaceutical company over $1.0 billion a year in sales. If you figure that the profit margin on a blockbuster product is typically around 1000 per cent, it is easy to see why pharmaceutical companies have relied on the blockbuster drug business model for the past few decades. Over the past several years, pharmaceutical company executives and Wall Street analysts have declared that the blockbuster drug model era may be drawing to a close. Unfortunately, it was this business model that enabled major pharmaceutical companies to make billions of dollars, grow larger and hire tens of thousands of new employees. Consequently, it should not come as a surprise, that the end of the blockbuster drug era will have a serious negative impact on the size of the global pharmaceutical workforce 
I just received an e-mail message from a medical writing colleague who worked with me at Wyeth. We got to know one another because she is a Seinfeld fan and I used to play softball with Larry David, (a co-creator of Seinfeld and the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm), while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. She loved to hear Larry stories. That said, she is a straight shooter who let folks know what she thought and how she felt. Unlike me, she is just starting her career as a medical writer and the job at Wyeth was her first. .jpg)
Congratulations! The resume that you spent many hours carefully crafting has resulted in a face-to-face interview at a Company that you are extremely interested in. After the adrenalin rush has worn off, you think “OMG, I have to put together a seminar, make travel arrangements and buy new clothes and shoes (well only if you are a woman)”. Although you may think that the hard part of your job search is over; think again….the fun is just beginning. 
The LondonTimes reported today that the 
Stephanie Saul of the NY Times reported today in an article entitled “.jpg)
As reported in 
Regardless of whether you work at a pharmaceutical company, in academia or at a government agency there are always workplace politics to deal with. Everyone always complains about how difficult and brutal it is to maneuver their way through or around all of the politics at work. That said, how do you know when workplace politics are REALLY out of control? .jpg){kind=small}
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I was teaching a class on "Start Up and Innovation" last week to a bunch of student enrolled in the SUNY-Stonybrook Biotechnology Certificate Program. The discussion invariably came back to patents and the patent process. For some reason,scientists are absolutely fascinated by the whole patent thing. For those of you who love science but hate doing labwork, I suggest that consider a job as a .jpg)
Doug Eisenstat over a JobBlog
Jena McGregor recently published an article in BusinessWeek/Online entitled “