A few articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:
- It's the "Pharma Year in Review" issue
- The Epipen mess (by Rick Mullin)
- A good reminder of the state of play of Zika (by Lisa Jarvis)
- The eteplirsen debacle at FDA (by Lisa Jarvis)
- Good article by Alex Scott about the other Cambridge biotech cluster (the one in England)
- Very interesting story by Matt Davenport about a joint Dow/UM case study where Dow provided the problem to UM graduate students, and discussed the students' solutions.
- It would be interesting to see where these students are in 5 years - whether or not this experience changed their potential career path (unlikely?), and whether or not it made them more attractive to industrial employers (yes, probably?)
That Dow collaboration is interesting, but I still question whether or not students see what "real" industry is like. As a former Dow employee, I noticed that the blue-sky R&D group (Core R&D) seemed to be shrinking at the expense of the business-aligned R&D groups. I don't know the folks listed in the story, but I wonder if the problems originated from Core or business R&D units. I always felt a little guilty recruiting new PhD's to come work for Dow and do cutting-edge research, knowing full well that they had an 80% chance of doing routine formulation science in one of the businesses.
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