Proposed: The Midwestern Revival and Antibiotics Research Act

This Derek Lowe post says a lot of things that I feel about the Midwest and its flagship research universities, but it is this comment from "Flyover country" that I want to highlight:

Disclaimer – I went to University of Minnesota for chemistry graduate school. 

This trend will only accelerate in the future. In older days, say – the 1970’s, there was more parity in chemistry. Funding was easier to get and students from second & third tier graduate schools might not become professors at R1 universities, but they were likely to find a industry job somewhere – even without a postdoc. With the contraction of pharma in the United States, one essentially needs a PhD/postdoc from an top-tier, elite institution to find an industry job, let alone even consider a tenure track job. When funding at second and third tier universities dries up, the New York Yankees (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Scripps) of the academic world can use their deep pockets to poach away the top tier professors. Top tier professors will want groups the size of Phil Baran or Barry Trost – they don’t want to be limited to 3-10 graduate students at a Midwestern university. 

Assume for a moment that academic funding was stable or even growing to support Midwestern schools. Disregard being a tenure-track professor at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern, or University of Kansas (if you’re an assistant TT professor there, you came from Harvard/Stanford/Scripps). Where are you going to work? Pfizer destroyed the pharma employment scene in the Midwest. Essentially all that remains is Eli Lilly in Indy & AbbVie in Chicago. Eli Lilly isn’t doing too well & while AbbVie isn’t tanking – it can’t absorb all of the chemistry grads in the Midwest. The top tier & even the second & third tier students will flee for the coasts because that is where the jobs are and the best schools. There are some places to work in the Midwest for chemists, but not nearly as many as the coasts. 

The Midwest (sadly) is a second tier place for chemists work and go to graduate school in chemistry. This just exacerbates & accelerates the trend.

This is mostly a cri-de-coeur about pharma (i.e. the fate of industrial medicinal/process chemistry in the Midwest), which I mostly agree with and have been emphasizing on this blog for a while.

(At the same time, I can point out a very small countervailing trend. Specifically, the state of Texas has seemed to manage to be able to pull away from top-tier older professors away from the coasts. That said, I don't think K.C. Nicolaou or John Wood represent a trend, and for some reason, it seems that Texas seems to have access to different funding structures than Ohio, Wisconsin or Illinois. I don't think it's really germane to FC's overall point.)

If I were to come up with a program to try to reverse this trend, here's what I would do:

• I'd begin funding life science research (both biology and chemistry) towards antibiotics to the tune of $30 billion a year, for 20 years
• Yes, yes, only some of it would be oriented towards graduate students, and it would be mostly portable training grants (i.e. giving the money to the student, not the PI) 
• All of this money would be for institutions outside the coasts. 
• The development of clinical compounds, etc. would be required to also be done in the Midwest, including all manufacturing. 

This doesn't have a snowball's chance of happening, but if I were the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, this is what I would be designing. 

Derek Lowe on the geography of medicinal chemistry jobs

Via his Reddit AMA, a relevant question answered by Derek Lowe:

u/organiker: Any tips on landing a med chem job these days for someone with a PhD + postdoc experience? 

Also, what's the typical career progression for someone ending up in a chief science officer/division head/head of chemistry type role? 

Derek Lowe: It's not easy out there, but it can be done. Your odds are probably better with smaller companies, and there are two ways to play that. One is to head to where the smaller companies (and many of the bigger ones) are, that is, Boston/Cambridge or the SF Bay area. That's not a bad idea, but another strategy might be to try outfits that aren't in such a rich labor environment and would be happier to get you. The downside of that is, when the small company wipes out, as many do, you're left without as many options. That factor alone is a big reason for the popularity of the big clusters. 

I don't know if there's a typical progression, as to the second question. A lot of larger companies have two tracks (managerial and scientific), so if you want one of those jobs, you'll want to be on the first one. I never inclined that way, so I may not be a good person to ask!

It will be really interesting to see when (if ever) Peak SSF or Peak Kendall Square will come, if ever. I suspect it will take some sort of bizarre event to change this trend, but maybe I'm wrong. 

Chart of the week: Cambridge and San Francisco uber alles

Credit: Bruce Booth

By LifeSciVC's Bruce Booth, quite the long article about why Massachusetts and San Francisco are pulling ahead in biopharma:

As a macro point, these data reflect the intuitive sense we have of recruiting talent from other regions into Boston: with regards to R&D teams, prior Pharma hubs are shrinking rapidly while Boston is growing. We’ve even recruited a few sun-loving San Diego biopharma vets to move to the Boston market recently.

Readers are probably quite tired of me pounding on this point (and I should limit myself to one of these posts about every month or so.) What does this mean? I'll take a couple of stabs:

• If you are a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow who intends to work in biopharma, picking an institution that has a healthy pipeline into universities or companies in the Bay Area or Boston would be key. 
• Although I suspect job security would be no greater than anywhere else, the likelihood of moving would be lower for scientists who live in these areas. 
• Economic development organizations should consider other new, exciting fields to attempt to start local clusters long before they consider trying to start a biopharma cluster. What is your town going to do that Seattle hasn't done? 

Overall, you should go read this piece - it's very well done and it's definitely food for thought. 

An excellent rant about scientific recruiters

From the inbox, a really great rant about scientific recruiters from someone we'll call FX:

As a [45+] year old [advanced degreed] chemist who is about to be laid off again, I have been searching for new employment and getting lots of contacts from recruiters. The vast majority of my interactions with them are very frustrating. I would think it is obvious that someone whose resume shows [10-20] years experience as an [instrumental] spectroscopist is not interested in a temp job running HPLC for $20/hour. How does the scientific recruiting industry stay afloat when all its members seem so incompetent? 

I keep updated resumes at sites such as Monster, Linkedin, Indeed and Glassdoor. I have noticed some things about recruiters that find me through Monster. For the resume I keep there I used a unique email address and a Google voice phone number so I know when someone who contacts me came from Monster. If I modify my resume there, I am guaranteed to get a number of calls/emails shortly thereafter offering contract positions and unrelated offers such as selling life insurance. 

I am assuming that there is some service that recruiters can pay for which sends a daily list of updated resumes to them? I also notice even though the same resume is at the other sites, > 90% of recruiters contacting me have come through Monster.
These are also all for temp or contractor positions, never permanent. 

Is that just a reflection of the sorry state of the chemistry job market in [one of the 4-7 pharma-related metro areas that are not SF or Cambridge] or is it because most companies trying to hire a contractor will put it out to a recruiter rather than just posting on their career site and get the applications through there? Why is there not a roughly equal amount of traffic through the other sites?

These are great questions and great observations.

First, it's dramatically clear to me that the median scientific recruiter I've met in my professional interactions is 1) has never worked as a scientist, 2) is quite young and 3) does not have a professional-level understanding of the field. It's very surprising to me, as FX notes, one hopes there is a hidden reserve of incredibly bright, talented and perceptive scientific recruiters out there. On more than one occasion, I've responded to recruiters with "this position is wildly unrelated to what I do - you should be looking for someone who works in [other industry.]"

(We should all take a moment to remember the odd days of 2011 or so, when it seemed like every medicinal chemist on LinkedIn was connected to the folks at Klein Hersh International.) 

Readers, any ideas as to why scientific recruiters tend not to have an intuition as to which chemists would respond best to their entreaties? Any thoughts as to if Monster is particularly bad? (My answer: yes, I think it is.) 

Where are the jobs on the Medicinal Chemistry Jobs List?

A quick compilation on the Medicinal Chemistry Jobs List shows:

California: 37
Massachusetts: 15
New Jersey: 1
Pennsylvania: 4
Connecticut: 2
All other states: 11

Quite a few of them in the Bay Area, it seems. 

Merck to build new Bay Area R&D campus

Via my daily Endpoints e-mail by John Carroll: 

Merck has staked out a new R&D campus for itself in the heart of South San Francisco, the epicenter of the Bay Area’s biotech mega-hub. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, the builder of many biotech facilities around the country, will be breaking ground on the site soon after Merck bought into a new, 294,000-square-foot West Coast research complex at 213 East Grand Avenue. The move-in date is being set for 2019.... 

...A Merck spokesman told me back in July that a central research campus in San Francisco would also open the door to about 100 new hires. 

“We will ultimately consolidate our Oncology, Immuno-oncology, Biologics and CMR discovery work into a combined research site,” she noted at the time. “Our Palo Alto site will continue to focus on Immuno-Oncology and Biologics and Vaccines discovery until the long-term facility is up and running.” 

The western migration follows a move by Merck to reduce staff levels at its operations in Kenilworth and Rahway, NJ. The move also affected its North Wales, PA screening facility. And Merck has already picked out a lab in Cambridge, MA for its expanded work in the East Coast hub. Now it’s well along the way to doing the same on the West Coast. 

All of that fits neatly into a broad industry trend that has dominated R&D over the past 5 years. Big Pharma has been identifying central hubs, often in the mega-centers like Cambridge, MA, Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, to concentrate its forces.

It's pretty amazing to me how pharma R&D is sorting itself into either Bay Area or Cambridge enclaves. With the assumption that this is (in the long run) where most of their medicinal chemists (and process chemists?) will be located, I imagine this will have the effect of increasing wages (while gains when compared to cost-of-living will be more modest.)

Does anyone see this trend reversing? I don't. Longtime readers are probably tired of me saying this: the prominence of Bay Area and Cambridge in pharma are due to decades of billions of federal research investments in world-class universities and medical centers combined with a relatively friendly funding atmosphere for entrepreneurial adventures. What this says for other regions and their pharma/biotech hopes isn't very positive, I'd think. 

Well, this is cheery

Via my daily Endpoints e-mail, a depressing roundup of Big Pharma dislocations, focusing on GSK and its RTP operations by John Carroll: 

Back in late 2014, when the company outlined plans to lay off 900 staffers in its WARN letter to the state, GSK had a sizable 2,500 R&D workforce in RTP. Today, a spokesperson tells me that’s dwindled down to about 400 as the company followed through on its cost-reduction plan. 

Hundreds of the workers were transferred to GSK’s CRO, Parexel, which promptly turned around and laid many of the same workers off in its own downsizing effort — outsourcing the layoffs, so to speak. 

“Today there is a very much reduced scale of R&D activity in RTP,” says the spokesperson for GSK. “What remains in RTP is some infectious disease research (including ViiV folks), late-stage research groups, regulatory and medical functions.” A “handful” of those people may still be in transition, she adds. 

GSK, though, is still investing heavily in R&D, as its $250 million lab project underscores. The company spends about $4.4 billion per year on R&D. 

Makeovers like this have become the rule rather than the exception in Big Pharma. Novartis’ latest rejigger happened weeks ago, as Merck was overhauling its ops with an eye to creating a new hub in the Bay Area. AstraZeneca is building a South San Francisco research hub as well. Pfizer long ago relocated much of its research staff into Boston/Cambridge, warning at the time that there would always be a focus on refining and changing in the face of new R&D priorities. Shire has been relocating staffers into its Boston-area HQ. And so on.

So what happened to those 2,100 people? How many of those people left science? I suppose we'll never know.

The inability of the media (including myself, I guess) to accurately measure headcount in pharma R&D is a continuing problem in being able to accurately quantify the quality of the chemistry job market; this is a disappointment. 

What's more expensive, Boston or San Francisco?

A cherished friend of the blog writes in with the following question; it has been [redacted] for privacy: 

I am trying to gauge the growth of the biotech/pharma sector in the Bay Area over the last few years: as you know, Boston is still the top destination, so my main concern is whether I will find other jobs if [things don't work out].  

[Also], I was wondering what a “good” salary is for the Bay Area. Currently [my spouse] is finishing grad school so we are pretty much a single income family, but [they] are getting [their advanced degree in tech] so we’re hoping that [they] will be making a decent amount of money soon. Any sources which can help me compare, for instance, what the equivalent of say a 120K salary in Boston would be for SF would be immensely helpful.

This is a good question, and one that I don't really have a strong sense of. It seems to me that San Francisco will continue to play "1A" to Boston's "1" for the foreseeable future. Absent some sort of bizarre catastrophe that strikes Silicon Valley, Stanford and UC-Berkeley (a series of huge earthquakes and fires?), it's hard for me to imagine that the science and financial ecosystem of the Bay Area will lose its relative position in the biopharma world, either nationally or internationally.

A brief look at median incomes and household income percentiles may be instructive, regarding pay scales. There are plenty of websites that compare cost of living, and I don't really know if any of them are better than others. I invite reader suggestions on that one.

However, I think one of the main drivers of high cost of living is the relative number of people with high incomes (I note here that I have read exactly none of the relevant social science around this.) So, a comparison of San Francisco County and Suffolk County, Massachusetts (using the Census Bureau's 2014 American Community Survey):

Suffolk County, MA: median income of $54,169, 26.9% earn more than $100,000
San Francisco County, CA: median income of $78,378, 40.9% earn more than $100,000

Nearby counties:

Middlesex County, MA: median income of $83,488, 42% earn more than $100,000
Norfolk County, MA: median income of $86,469, 43.6% earn more than $100,000

San Mateo County, CA: median income of $91,421, 46.2% earn more than $100,000 

Marin County, CA: median income of $91,529, 58.2% earn more than $100,000

This suggests to me that one would have to earn significantly more than $120,000 ($174,000?) in order to keep the same lifestyle.* That is, of course, likely a ridiculous wild guess. Readers, please tell me how wrong I am.

UPDATE: Thanks to Joe Q., I've decided to add some of the adjoining counties. 

*Or, likely, that's how much you would have to earn to stay in the immediate metro area of the city, and not have a longer commute? 

Bucks County medicinal chemistry

Also in this week's C&EN, an interesting article by Rick Mullin on the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center of Bucks County, a joint public/private hub for small biotechs. I thought this was very interesting:

Flores, who is now head of discovery for hepatitis B at Janssen, says that as a largely virtual company, Novira could have set up anywhere. But, like Sofia, he saw obvious advantages to coming to BCBC—which he had not heard of, despite working 20 minutes away at Merck’s West Point, Pa., facility—given its community of hepatitis B research.... 

...In fact, Novira has moved at lightning speed, taking its lead drug candidate from discovery through Phase I clinical trials in less than three years and producing results that got Janssen’s attention. Flores says the company did this using a minimal number of on-site researchers and relying heavily on contract research organizations in China and Germany. It has also been able to attract top talent. “Almost everyone I hired at Novira is from Merck or Roche.” 

But a talented workforce is only one component in establishing a successful biotech company, Flores adds. Also necessary are local sources of venture capital and a pool of experienced executives. Novira received initial seed funding from BioAdvance, a Philadelphia-based venture firm. And there are experienced managers in the region. But there is nowhere near the concentration of venture funding sources and scientists with start-up experience that can be found around places like Boston....

This article is, I feel, instructive of potentially the best case scenario after major pharmaceutical research sites close. There was already space available and it was close enough to a major center of finance (Philadelphia) - and still, only 325 people (200 scientists) are employed there. Yikes.

(I wonder what would happen if you were to compare Doylestown to all the other non-coastal places that have suffered major site closures/layoffs: Ann Arbor, St. Louis, etc.) 

Biotech cluster setup? Don't even bother.

Through a short summary from FierceBiotech's Nick Paul Taylor, I see that the Los Angeles Times is covering former Governor Jeb Bush's attempt to set up a biotech cluster around Scripps Florida (article by Noah Bierman): 

...He called a rare special session of the Legislature to approve the state’s share of the Scripps package — $310 million plus interest over 10 years — and won easy approval from the county government to spend more than $200 million. To make his case, he circulated a five-page economic impact study that said Florida could build a biotech economy every bit as impressive as the one that took decades to germinate in San Diego, only faster and bigger, with potential to add more than 40,000 jobs within 15 years of operation. 

Twelve years later, those dreams have not come true. 

Florida employed 27,611 people in biotech last year, according to the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity, or just 952 more people than it did in 2007, the last year for which the state has comparable data. Scripps accounts for many of those jobs, with a head count of 646 people in Florida. 

The data do show a doubling in the number of biotech establishments. And Scripps says it has attracted $425 million in federal grants and donations. 

But the promise of Florida’s investment was about a jobs bonanza from spinoff companies. 

Bush was captivated by the Scripps headquarters in La Jolla, a tony San Diego suburb where 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney owns a home. The institute and its satellite offices are located along Torrey Pines Road, a verdant stretch connecting it to the famed golf course of the same name as well as sandstone coastal bluffs and the ocean. The biotech boom around Scripps is hard to miss. Science and medical companies dot the area.

Florida, meanwhile, remains an afterthought in the biotech world. No Florida city has cracked the annual list of top 10 biopharma clusters compiled by Genetic Engineering and Biotech News, an industry publication. Traditional powers including San Diego, Los Angeles and the Bay Area dominate the list...

First, does anyone who has experience in the Jupiter area disagree with the article's assessment? Is it too early in the game to make a call?

Second, this story allows me to tee off on a favorite hobbyhorse of mine, which is the quixotic attempt of local governments to get their cities/states into the biotech business. I personally think it's a tremendous money loser; the benefits only accrue to the lucky few scientists who are recruited in early, when there's a lot of government cash to hand out by the attendant politicians (who also benefit when they show up at ribbon cuttings.) The taxpayer is left with the bill. I think it's clear that to do this right, you need:

• More than one world-class clinical research hospital 
• More than one world-class basic research university
• More than one large pharma/biotech/medical device company with a major R&D center in the geographical area
• Lots of available venture capital
• Lots of available experienced scientists
• An amenable business climate

(I'll bet items 1-3 are most important.)

Even the cities that do have these things (I'm looking at you, San Diego, RTP) have not done nearly as well in the last 20 years as San Francisco and Boston/Cambridge. 

It's a mug's game and I think that Florida is only one example. 

Weekend discussion topic: where should you move to, right now?

Derek Lowe noted Jones Lang LaSalle's ranking of biopharma hubs, with its absolutely ridonkulous placement of RTP over the Bay Area. Here's FierceBiotech's summary: 

A new survey from the property analysts at JLL, or Jones Lang LaSalle, ranked Beantown as the top biotech cluster in America, followed by Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco, San Diego and New York City. 

The key factors for a top ranking centered on the concentration of biotech employment in the metro area (with a 25% weighting) followed by VC funding (20%), NIH funding (20%), life sciences patents (15%), the concentration of life sciences establishments (10%) and employment growth (10%).

Whaaa?

Here's my criteria: Boston and San Francisco are the only places where I would tell a new M.S. chemistry graduate "You could probably move there without a job, live in a closet of a hovel and maybe network and find some work in a couple of months." No other place in America would I say that.

Thoughts?  

Governor makes reference to grandiose plans, CJ chuckles

From this week's ACS Industry Insights newsletter, a link to a Xconomy post about the loss of continued Washington state R&D funding for its life science ambitions:

The defunding of the Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) combined with the failure to renew a long-standing research and development tax credit was a disappointment—and, some say privately, a shock—to the state’s biotech industry, particularly at a time when others in the Northwest, including Montana and Oregon, are committing state funds to life sciences research.... 

...Some $11 million in funding for the LSDF was siphoned to the state general fund as part of the $38.2 billion, two-year state operating budget signed late Tuesday by Inslee (pictured above at a WBBA event in 2014), narrowly averting a government shutdown. Lawmakers enacted historic tuition cuts at public universities and channeled hundreds of millions of dollars to teachers and schools in an attempt to fulfill the state constitution’s mandate to adequately fund education....

 And there was this concluding statement in the article:

...Inslee’s spokeswoman added, “While the Legislature did not produce a budget that includes LSDF or R&D incentives, Governor Inslee remains committed to our state’s goal of becoming the global leader in life science innovation and health delivery and will continue to work hard to realize this vision for our state.”

Does anyone buy this stuff? What would it take for Washington (i.e. Seattle) to become a "global leader in life science innovation"? A 11.5 earthquake in the Bay Area that forces Stanford, UC-Berkeley and UCSF to relocate to Seattle? 20X the current rather substantial federal life sciences R&D funding that Washington gets?

(I should note here that Washington is not the only state to have these ambitions...) 

I love corporate America, part 731

I'm saddened to learn of layoffs at Amgen; I'm rather ironically amused to learn that cuts have a name from a comment by Chrispy at In The Pipeline (emphasis mine):

The current trend of gutting internal R&D with the hope in in-licensing Phase II molecules is not a model for long-term success. Without researchers you will not even understand what you are buying. But maybe it doesn't matter if you don't listen to them, anyway (e.g., Sirtris). 

The nutty thing from the inside is that this particular layoff was branded "Amgen Full Potential" as if the laid-off folk were the problem. No, guys, less is less, and full potential moving forward is less than it could have been without this exercise. 

You know, great plans always have a name, kind of like "Adapting to Scale", "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom" or "The Great Leap Forward".  Good on you, Amgen bosses, for keeping the trend alive.

In all seriousness, something from that FierceBiotech story is bothersome to me (again, emphasis mine):

Amgen ($AMGN) reported Tuesday evening that it plans to ax up to 15% of the company's workforce, shutting down all of its facilities in Colorado and Washington state as it slashes up to 2,900 staffers. 

Big research and manufacturing sites in Seattle and Bothell, WA, and Boulder and Longmont, CO, are all on the chopping block, including the sprawling 750,000-square-foot Helix research campus in Seattle with 610 staffers. And while it plans to keep its headquarters in Thousand Oaks, CA, the Big Biotech says it will consolidate a smaller headcount among fewer buildings, shrinking its corporate footprint. 

Derek Lowe notes that the Boston and San Francisco Amgen sites will actually add headcount.

Seems to me that many economic development commissions for larger municipalities will always tout the possibility of their area becoming its own biotech hub. When I hear those claims, I always think about the Seattle area, how it is so close to national status and seems to have never quite gotten there, thanks to blows like this one. And then I ask, local government people, what are you going to do that Seattle hasn't? 

Where are the non-academic PhD chemists in the United States? Where aren't they?

Here's an interesting visualization of the geography of industrial (or at least non-academic) chemistry, from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Two things to explain here that I think I understand about these charts:

• The darker the state is, the higher the absolute number of non-academic Ph.D. physical scientists.
• The selected states have the highest (or lowest) rate of chemists amongst non-academic Ph.D. physical scientists. 

Here's the raw numbers, in order of "prevalence index", a number that's not explained in the chart:

Chemists most prevalent: Delaware: 7.836, New Jersey: 2.459, Indiana: 1.475, North Carolina: 1.393, Michigan: 1.115, Kentucky: 0.721, Arkansas: 0.607

Chemists least prevalent: North Dakota: 0.2620, Nevada: 0.2620, New Hampshire: 0.3110, New Mexico: 0.3440, South Dakota: 0.4260, Mississippi: 0.4780, Vermont: 0.5740, Idaho: 0.7700, Wyoming: 0.7700, Montana: 0.8360, Alaska: 0.8690. 

I'm not positive that this chart showed me anything I didn't know (I probably would not have guessed Kentucky or Arkansas, but that's about it.) That said, it's worth a click. 

The RTP is not Detroit, Detroit is not the RTP

I don't really want to get into a big discussion on Detroit's bankruptcy -- you can go elsewhere for that sort of thing. That said, The Atlantic's James Fallows posted a reflection from a reader, and I found one aspect to be a bit silly (emphasis mine):

And yet, there is hope. Detroit has begun to reinvent itself, both in the city and in the metro area as a whole. SE Michigan does have a ton of engineers and a high level of R&D dollars being spent. While the bankruptcy is sad, just as GM's bankruptcy on 1 Jun 2009 was, it'll be far sadder if Detroit can't continue to reinvent itself as it has from the darkest days of 2008-9. The bankruptcy is payment for the sins of the past - but this purgatory should lead Detroit on a path to success. There's no reason that Detroit can't mirror what North Carolina's Research Triangle did in the '90s and '00s. And considering how much Detroit has made America look at herself over its history - I think we should all be rooting for the Motor City to rocket forward from here.

Not only can I not help but love Detroit - I can't help but believe in that city too.

Contra what your local economic development council tells you, you can't grow that kind of R&D focus overnight. There's probably plenty of reasons that Detroit can't turn itself into RTP, and not soon enough for it to make a difference -- a shame, to be sure.

[Seems to me that the main difference between Detroit and the RTP region is difference in economic focus of the regions: automobile manufacturing versus life sciences. Which one of those does America still have a relative comparative advantage in? I also wonder if there's a difference between the concentration of research-oriented universities in the RTP region and the Detroit area.]

UPDATE: Lisa Jarvis and Celia Arnaud point out that the more likely places for a life sciences renaissance in Michigan would Ann Arbor or Kalamazoo. This actually reminds me of something that I meant to point out in the original post, which is the seeming annihilation of Michigan's pharmaceutical research centers during the 1990s/2000s. It would be interesting to know what percentage of Michigan resident life scientists ended up 1) leaving the region, but still working in pharma or 2) staying in Michigan, but leaving pharma.

Where should a young chemist hope to start their career? (Part 1 of dialogue with Andre the Chemist)

The rest of this week, Andre the Chemist and I will be talking about career advice for (relatively) young chemistry professionals. Today, I'm writing about job geography and Andre is responding at his blog. -- CJ

UPDATE: Andre has responded at his blog. (Truly hilarious and thoughtful.)

Dear Andre:

Hope that you are enjoying your summer -- and that you're getting a good workout on the minor league wrestling circuit (isn't that what unusually large academic chemists do when they're not doing research or writing lecture notes?) 

Anyway, thanks for doing this dialogue with me. I'm excited to find and discuss our differences (if we have any) on what we think relatively young chemists should be doing to further their careers. I wanted to talk about geography -- and I think you wanted to talk about when chemists should specialize? Either way, I'm excited to hear what you have to say. 

I know it's been a month, but I wanted to pick some nits about some advice you gave recently to graduates (B.S. and further): 

...Go anywhere for a job. 

This is a big country. There are lots of places. Lots of these places have jobs. Some of these jobs are interesting. 

When I talk with students about jobs, I always ask if there are any locations in particular they are focusing on. Most students say they are looking at a combination of area X (which is close to where they attended school), area Y (which is close to where they grew up), and/or big city Z (which is any big city where it's fun to be a twenty-something)... (snip) 

...If you find a job in Idaho or Oklahoma or West Virginia or Arkansas or New Mexico or Michigan, try it out. You'll still get to see your friends and family. As a college graduate who's employed you'll make enough money to go on trips. You can fly anywhere in the country in a day and you can drive a lot of places. 

If you move someplace and don't like your job or where you live, you know what? Move someplace else. At least you'll be making money and getting job experience. And I haven't even talked about working in another country.

I agree that students tend to fall into the X, Y, Z category, and that they can be relatively unwilling to consider other areas. Personally, I am nearly indifferent to where I live, just as long as I can make the rent and my wife can find a job as well.* But I think that students are making a certain amount of sense:

1) The ties of family and friends count for a lot, in terms of happiness. Community takes time (and money!)  to build and it makes sense for students to attempt to preserve some social capital by either staying where they are, or going back to where they have been. While community can be developed and friends can be had by moving someplace and meeting people (I can say this, having done it a number of times), I suspect that people (and society in general) are getting worse, not better, at joining communities or integrating newcomers into communities. 

2) Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems like we're at a moment in our society where broad prosperity doesn't seem to be spreading across the country. Rather, there are pockets where things are going quite well (Silicon Valley, I'm looking at you) and there are places that seem less prosperous (St. Louis? Baltimore? I don't really want to single a city out.) While I don't doubt that your students' perspectives are skewed by television and that they're not consulting the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the latest on unemployment, do you think that some cities might be better for chemists (Boston, definitely) and some might be worse? 

I am loathe to give people firm advice on how to prioritize choices for a career**, and I suspect that what you are saying is "don't count any place out!" and I agree, for the most part. But I wonder if we can, through our discussion, come up with a means of determining what might be a good set of priorities that aren't 1) close to home/family or 2) in big city Z. If you put a gun to my head, here's my list:

1. Choose places where there are lots of people older/more experienced than you that you can learn from, than not. 

2. Choose bigger institutions over smaller ones. 

3. Choose bigger cities over smaller cities. 

4. Choose more densely populated regions over less densely populated ones. 

I confess I'm trolling a bit here, but I suspect that a successful career will have more in common with this list than not. 

What is it like for academics? Does the bright lights of the big city shine for you guys? What place would you never, ever, not-in-a-million years live? Can't wait to hear about it. 

Cheers, Chemjobber

*It would take a lot for me to live somewhere where it is consistently humid. 

**People who write to me for advice are probably frustrated by me saying "First, go think deeply about what is truly important to you." 

Derek Lowe, on a career in pharma

From a very interesting interview in Trends in Pharmaceutical Sciences, Derek Lowe speaks:

TIPS: What advice would you offer someone interested in pursuing a career in the pharma industry today? 

I’m tempted to say ‘Run for your life!’ But that's not quite accurate, or not yet. What I would emphasize, though, is that it's a terrible time to be an undistinguished scientist doing drug discovery, at least in a high-wage country. The grunt work is easier to hire out to people who will do it for less money, so my advice to people is to try to give them something that they can’t buy so easily in Shanghai or Bangalore. And even as these places get more expensive, and the acute phase of outsourcing passes, the point remains that you should always have a good answer to the question ‘Why do we pay you?’ You should try, as much as possible, to be able to do some things that no one else around in the company can do, which will usually mean keeping up with new research ideas as they emerge. Or thinking up your own, of course. 

Other advice: you’ll probably find yourself starting with, or working at, smaller companies than you might have imagined. I think that there's a shift in the population of drug researchers, with proportionally fewer of them at the large organizations and more in the smaller ones. So you’d better be prepared to move from job to job as well, because the smaller companies are probably going to be a bumpier ride. A corollary to that is to strongly consider moving to an area that has a good startup culture, so that there's a better chance of finding somewhere else to go when and if the time comes.

Well, that's all over good news.

The geography of US biotech and its effects on jobs

Credit: Jones Lang LaSalle

Luke Timmerman recently called out real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle's ranking of US biotech hubs, especially its ranking of San Diego over the San Francisco Bay Area. Derek Lowe chimed in and agreed that the home of the Giants and 49ers should be ranked higher than America's Finest City. For what it's worth, I certainly agree that it's a counterintuitive finding. (Don't miss Timmerman's dogging of Lindbergh Field; if only MCRD would move somewhere else...)

I think the idea of this sort of weighted formula ranking is really fun, but sort of quixotic. If you click through it, you see that they actually ranked the above cities 1 (Boston) through 21 (Atlanta). What is it about Seattle that makes it "established", while Westchester/New Haven, CT is "emerging"? Should New Jersey be lumped in with New York City? How is Cleveland the same biotech hub as Cincinnati (distance of 249 miles)? How about southern Wisconsin and Chicago (90 miles)? Where's St. Louis? Is the canoe wood or aluminum?

If I were to do this sort of thing, I would basically narrow it down to 2 cities, Boston and San Francisco, and then everyone else. They're not giving up their crowns any time soon, either -- if anything, it seems like Boston/Cambridge is consolidating its gains. In the Great Recession years, how many life scientists moved to Boston as opposed to moved away?

Either way, it seems to me that people who might want to work in the biotech industry would be well advised to make sure their educational institutions (and the networks (ugh) within those institutions) filter into the above hubs, and (as a safe bet), probably the "established ones."

Also, note the relative position of the industrial Midwest or the Mountain West in these rankings -- sigh. Do we think that they will emerge by 2020?

Readers, am I crazy? 

What's wrong with New Jersey?

Also in this week's C&EN, Lisa Jarvis covers the Roche Nutley site closure. She ends her article on an interesting set of comments about New Jersey:

“Nutley’s legacy and footprint as a much larger former regional headquarters and a manufacturing site left us with an expensive and oversized infrastructure,” says Thomas G. Lyon, the Nutley site’s head. “While we have made notable progress to cut costs by more than 50% in the past two-and-a-half years, it was not enough.” 

The shuttering of the Nutley operations is part of a troubling trend for the life sciences in New Jersey. From 2007 to 2010, the number of drug industry jobs in the state fell by 22.4% to 32,794, according to a report released last month by the nonprofit Battelle and the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

Pharma’s retrenchment from New Jersey is a symptom of the industry’s changing approach to research, says Richard M. Gordon, a drug industry analyst at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Although the state is steeped in traditional drug discovery expertise, companies are now investing more heavily in large molecules and “information-driven discovery,” Gordon says. “New Jersey’s competitive advantage was one of the previous generation, but it offers nothing in terms of the new generation,” he says. When considering where to put new labs, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly looking at San Francisco and the Boston area, which offer proximity to biotech firms and academic research centers. 

Merck & Co. and Pfizer both shed jobs in the state after their 2009 acquisitions of Schering-Plough and Wyeth, respectively. Among the more recent setbacks for New Jersey, Sanofi is set to close its Bridgewater facility by the end of the year. Research activities will be moved to a new site in Boston.

The article also comes with a map that suggests that (according to BIO), the overall US biotech industry has lost 7.0% of its positions since 2007. Those losses fall unevenly on New Jersey, which has lost 22% of its positions during that time, while California has only lost -1.8% of its positions and Massachusetts has gained 4.2% of its positions.

I would like to hear some independent confirmation of Professor Gordon's hypothesis that New Jersey's pharma expertise is old and busted. I also suspect that "information-driven discovery" is a term that is compleat bulls---te mostly meaningless. I think that New Jersey's problems have more to do with the area having an unusually large amount of pharmaceutical research campuses (campii?); as we all know, these research campuses haven't done anything awesome for us lately and are just costing us money are prime targets for large pharma cuts, in that they're full of relatively well-paid scientists.

I don't have a hypothesis, but I do have a set of observations. At the start of the last decade, I would have said that there were 5 pharma/biotech metropolitan hubs (in order of prominence): Boston, San Francisco, New Jersey, San Diego and the RTP area in North Carolina. (Feel free to argue with my order in the comments.) It seems to me that New Jersey, RTP and San Diego have done the poorest, while Boston and San Francisco have maintained their positions. Why is that? I have no idea. (Guesses: relative prominence of local biology departments? local VC/startup culture? dependence on federal support?)

Readers, any thoughts?