Bruce Roth, inventor of atorvastatin (Lipitor) has tough things to say about #chemjobs

From this week's Chemical and Engineering News, a terribly interesting interview with Bruce Roth, the inventor of atorvastatin. He was at Parke-Davis Warner-Lambert Pfizer, now he's a VP at Genentech. It's not exactly a cheerful interview:

Firms turned to mergers and acquisitions to fill pipelines. The shifts have cost drugmakers dearly, Roth says, both in the loss of thousands of talented scientists who’ve been laid off and in the lost diversity of approaches to tackling problems. “We’ve eaten our own here,” he laments. “Since we got to the 21st century it’s been all about layoffs and cutbacks and mergers and offshoring.” [snip] 

Roth himself has been on both sides of the chopping block. He was one of several thousand laid off in 2007 when Pfizer closed the Ann Arbor, Mich., site where he worked. He’s also had to let go scientists who worked for him, and he says he understands the cost pressures that lead companies to those decisions. Still, “as an American chemist it is something you agonize over,” Roth says, “because it isn’t clear where U.S. chemists trained in organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry are going to find their jobs in the future. [snip] 

“I have been really fortunate to work in what I think we will look back on as being the heyday of the pharmaceutical industry,” Roth says. “The sad thing looking back at my career is that as an organic chemist there are very few things that I could’ve imagined that would be more rewarding than making medicines. And yet in the future, there will be many fewer positions like mine.” 

You know, I don't know how many prominent chemists it will take to sound the alarm about the future of jobs in pharmaceutical chemistry (medchem and process) before someone actually does something about it. Too late, maybe?

(In a darker mood, I wonder if every single US-based grad student in organic chemistry should be forced to read this article and write a 100 word essay on what they plan to do when they graduate. Happy Monday.)

(I also wonder if the closing of the Ann Arbor site will be seen as some sort of inflection point in this saga; it seemed like there were so many jobs lost for relatively little gain on the part of Pfizer. Maybe I'm wrong.)

Nice economy you've got there -- 'twould be a shame if something were to happen to it...

Now here's a tactic unemployed chemists should adopt -- a mild threat disguised as an appeal for funding. Regarding the impending shutdown of the Tevatron* that employs over 1,000 physicists (hat tip Planet Money):

To the Editor: 

Re “The Tevatron” (editorial, Jan. 22): 

It is not only sad that such a productive atom smasher as the Tevatron in Illinois will be shut down but it may also not be wise. When, in 1993, Congress shut off funds for the superconducting supercollider being built underground in Texas, many of the newly unemployed physicists found jobs on Wall Street. Wouldn’t you rather have the nation’s physicists smashing protons than designing and smashing collateralized debt obligations? 

Jay M. Pasachoff
Naomi Pasachoff
Pasadena, Calif., Jan. 22, 2011 

The writers are, respectively, a visiting scientist at Caltech and a research associate at Williams College.

I can only imagine the letter to the editor now. "It is not only sad that the Pfizer Sandwich site in the UK may be shut down, but it may also not be wise. Many foreign regimes would pay healthy sums to unemployed industrial chemists to develop processes for certain dual-use industrial chemicals. Wouldn't you rather have the nation's chemists synthesizing pharmaceutical compounds than designing and deploying weapons of mass destruction?"**

* Why doesn't DOE build massive chemistry experiments for the employment of chemists? I'm sure origin-of-life chemistry could use a little boost, to name a random field.
**A note to any US/UK intelligence assets reading this blog: this is satire. 

The plural of paltry is not "far from stagnant"

From the January 24 issue of Chemical and Engineering News, a sidebar from an article on liberal arts teaching positions:

Chemists Wanted

The job market for liberal arts faculty positions is far from stagnant. For example, Simmons College is in the midst of a faculty search for a physical or biophysical chemist with strengths in instrumentation. Claremont McKenna College is currently seeking a biochemist, a molecular biologist, and a climate scientist. An organic chemist is retiring from Haverford College, which will most likely mean a job opening in the coming year. The chemistry department at Bowdoin College is seeking approval to hire two new physical organic chemists in 2011. And the chemistry department at Drew University recently advertised a two-year position for a visiting professor in organic chemistry.

I find this paragraph a little irritating, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I think it's the context-less statement that the job market for liberal arts faculty positions is "far from stagnant" -- what does that even mean? In that there's a fair number of positions, sure, that might be a reasonable position. In the practical sense that the average chemist could potentially attain one of these positions, that's most certainly not the case. The competition for teaching jobs is too fierce for words. I can't quite tell what the writer is trying to say, but I'm pretty sure that I disagree with them.

The comment on the Haverford College retirement is (in my arrogant opinion) naive at best; there's no telling what the faculty and administration will do. The Bowdoin College position hasn't appeared yet -- no ads. (Right? Wait, let me check... nope! It's not on their faculty hiring page.) The position at Drew is on the Wheel of Pain -- I'm not sure we want to count that.

Nice try, folks. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Family separation -- the new normal?

A depressing topic for a Monday morning, for which I apologize. I'm noticing a new trend in our post (?)-recession economy, which is the family breadwinner (typically the father) going away from their family and working, while the other spouse (typically the mother) stays behind with the kids. Obviously, the difficulties of selling their current home is part of this problem.

I'm hearing people plan for this, I'm seeing it in the workforce and I'm seeing it in my Facebook news feed. While I don't doubt that most (if not all) of the affected families are planning for reunion of some sort, there will undoubtedly be a small (but non-zero) number of families which will be hurt by this. This is a new twist to the two-body problem, which seems to hit young marrieds more than families with kids.

I suspect that the trend is quite strong in chemistry. While the past expansion in pharma/biotech had spread beyond the traditional hubs (SD, SF, BOS, NJ, NC), one imagines that the post-2003 era of mergers and layoffs has hit the smaller places (the Seattles of the world) harder. I don't doubt there are many people getting hired on in one of the hubs (where the remaining jobs are), renting a small apartment in the big city and keeping their families elsewhere, where the cost of living is lower and the quality of life may be higher.

Let's hope this trend(let?) reverses itself, as/when/if things get better.

Our chemical mercenary future?

An interesting trend in Susan Ainsworth's Employment Outlook article was the mention of contingent or contract workers:

Although job prospects in pharma companies are slim right now, employment opportunities are growing elsewhere as drug firms increasingly rely on outsiders to supplement their bone-lean workforces. "As a result of this shift, there is likely to be greater demand for consultants and contract workers," Saras points out. "While these positions may be less desirable than those in a drug company, they can help people keep their skills fresh and expand their networks and can lead to full-time opportunities in the future."

[snip]

Life-sciences-based firms are not the only ones relying more on contract workers, says Kelly Services' Edwards. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the total contingent workforce accounts for at least one-quarter of all workers and is growing at two to three times the rate of the traditional workforce. What's more, contingent workers are expected to comprise nearly 50% of the U.S. workforce added after the recession.

This recent Vertex position is a great example of this potential trend (sent in by an astute reader):

Temp. 3 Month Contract 

A Scientist will design and develop chemistry on a synthetic project and will be involved in conducting laboratory experiments to enable the delivery of compound to support early toxicology and technical transfer.  A Scientist will physically be involved with developing new chemistry and demonstrating that chemistry by delivering bulk intermediates or API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) at expected purity for phase of development. 

While you can easily understand the motivations behind the position for each side of the table ("We need hands now!!" / "It's not a great job, but it's a job for a while"), I would argue that this is a not a good trend for the pharmaceutical industry. I cannot imagine that you can have an effective R&D workforce if it is constantly thinking about looking for a new position.

Perhaps I should grow up and embrace this potential harbinger of our brave new future. One could imagine (please forgive the mixed metaphors) a pseudo-liberal arts academia model: a few permanent staff that have lifetime employment and a vast sea of M.S./Ph.D. chemistry ronin that wander about from company to company, working 2 year contracts. "We deal in compound, friend." 

Does chemistry make you happy?

"Ryan Bingham: Your resume says you minored in French Culinary Arts. Most students work the frier at KFC. You busted tables at Il Picatorre to support yourself. Then you got out of college and started working here. How much did they pay you to give up on your dreams?

Bob: Twenty seven thousand a year.

Ryan Bingham: At what point were you going to stop and go back to what made you happy?" - from "Up in the Air"

The other day, I watched "Up in the Air"; for those of you who don't know, it's a movie about a man (Bingham, played by George Clooney) who flies around the country meeting with people who are about to get laid off. Despite the rather cruel job, he's quite humane about it.

Contra the above exchange, someone paid me a lot less to go to graduate school and chase my dream. To be stereotypical, I think Hollywood is full of people who feel a tad guilty and smug that they get to do what they like, while the rest of America slaves away in a cubicle or stands behind a cash register. But this guy (two thumbs pointed at me) mostly loves what his hands have been doing for the past ten years or so. While I might wish to change some details of my working situation (and who doesn't?), I like my job and the people I work with a lot. I don't find myself daydreaming about what I might do if I won the lottery.*

I'm sure that, for some, chemistry is 'just a job'; however, I've mostly met other people who really like chemistry too. It's really sad that, in our tough time, chemists can't find jobs doing what they love.

So here's to chemistry, a job that makes me happy. I hope it makes you happy, too.

*I don't play the lottery.