Pharma shrinking, Proroguing the inevitable

For some reason, the Montreal Gazette has a piece from the Windsor Star on the website this morning, and it freaks me out. The headline runs: "Workforce expert predicts future jobs." Which is a little like a meteorologist predicting that the future will have weather.

Apparently she's been waiting for a long time for appointments in offices that contain 5-year-old copies of The Economist; arguing that economic growth will depend on local people training and upgrading their skills. "You can't deny the importance of the knowledge economy," she is quoted as saying. The article also says she offers the pharmaceutical industry as a growth area for job seekers.

Now we'll leave alone the fact that we have more people with university degrees than our economy knows what to do with, and just point out that last year alone, Pfizer cut 19 500 jobs. This is the 2nd time in three years they've topped the pharma charts; in 2007 they cut another 10 000 jobs. This past year, Merck cut another 16 000 jobs; Johnson & Johnson slashed almost 9 000; and AstraZeneca lost about 7 500. Between the top 6 job cuts in the industry, over 63 000 jobs went to the big market in the sky.

The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical industry is scrambling to make money right now. There are no blockbuster drugs waiting for approval from the FDA, no huge breakthroughs that promise huge profits. Without the ability to provide any goods, big pharma is reduced to making money in the way that corporations usually do it: mergers, acquisitions and cuts. This is bad news for the workers, none of whom have the advantageous situation of, say, a GM employee.

All that to say that big pharma is not a growth industry in real terms, and anything decent in "little" pharma is going to get its intellectual property snapped up by one of the big boys, leaving little but empty infrastructure and unemployment in its wake. Not what I would describe as a strong market.

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A couple of words on prorogation.

Proroguing Parliament is nothing new. Everyone has done it, from Sir John A to Jean Chretien. Normally, however, Parliament is prorogued to start a holiday break or to end a session. Harper's prorogations have been special, certainly in the modern Parliament (last 30-40 years).

Last time, Harper prorogued Parliament because he was facing a vote of confidence that he thought he might lose, and that a coalition of opposition parties might form a government. So he asked the Governor-General if he could buy some time while he talked with various parties long enough to let the coalition run its natural course: failure. This was annoying, but it was smart politics.

This time, however, the reasons for prorogation are less clear. There is a scandal before the government regarding Afghan detainees, the Olympic Games in February, and another vote of confidence coming in March (the budget). However, these issues don't seem overwhelming - not while important bills are waiting before the House (the anti-crime legislation that is an integral part of the Conservative platform, for example).

This prorogation comes during a scheduled break from Parliament. This is pretty much unheard of, and extends the break from 39 days to 76 days. It is disingenuous for Harper to say that this is a routine procedure: the only other prorogation that lasted this long since 1968 (as early as I checked) was Chretien's 82-day prorogation in 2003-2004; executed mostly to avoid Sheila Fraser's report on the Sponsorship Scandal and inquiries into military conduct in Somalia. For the Conservatives to criticize Chretien's move while defending Harper is outright hypocrisy.

Which shouldn't surprise me, I suppose. What does surprise me is that something was worth wasting political capital on prorogation. What's waiting in the wings when Parliament resumes in March?

Ethical Facelifts

Bit of a change in style. Now accepting applications for cool logos.

It's been a long time since I saw so many articles about scientific ethics in the news in so short a period. Well, since Vioxx, anyways. Not long ago, I alluded to the Swiss as having gone "bugf#$k nuts," by which I meant totally crazy. Since 2004, they have enforced a Gene Technology Law, which stipulates that in Swiss experiments, the dignity of [living things] needs to be considered in research. They are in the press these days because they have upheld the decision as it applies to plants, which of course made everyone go "wuh?"

The first effect of this law is to make science even less feasible economically - a Swiss study involving maternal separation in monkeys is going to court now to find out whether it can proceed or not. Making your scientists go to court is only diverting more funds from the state to fight these legal battles, making science that much more expensive to carry out. This is not a good thing for a country's biotech industry, or their "intellectual economy".

Another thing, as pointed out in this Nature editorial, is that dignity is a slippery concept. They cite an American governmental inquiry on dignity in bioethics, which the boys at Nature seem to think is self-contradictory. And they're probably right, but I don't have the time nor the inclination to go wallowing through a 577-page .pdf file written by various and sundry higly respected thinkers to find out that dignity is tough to talk about meaningfully, because it's tough to define, but nonetheless vitally important.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not getting down on dignity. I'm just saying if you ask a dozen people what it is, you'll get 12 different answers, and that this translates to an important point about how advances in the sciences are going to have to force progress in humanities. Development in science is outstripping the development of laws and ethics to control them.

As a direct result of this, you get what we have in California right now, which I also alluded to in an earlier post. California recently issued cease-and-desist letters to various companies that engage in direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Several companies now will sequence your genome (for a small fee) and compare it to known bits of code that predispose you to heart disease, Alzheimer's, whatever. California's decision to require a physician's consent for the tests seems to be an oddly reactionary biotech policy from a state that is known for creating $100 million funds for stem cell research under the nose of the Bush administration.

The legality of this question, assuming a class-action suit against the State by the companies involved, will hinge upon the legislature in this article. Essentially, the decision should be predicated on whether these tests are diagnostic or not. As the lawyers for the defense know, they are not. Diagnostic tools are predictive - a positive result indicates a medical condition and informs the appropriate treatment. What these companies do is associational - they can look at your bits of DNA code and then say "ooh, people with that bit have a 6-fold increased risk of getting the hoobajabbies after their 65th birthday! You'd better start taking antioxidants!" Which is why I agreed with the CEO of one of these companies in my last post when he implied that their industry was entertainment more than anything else.

I think that ethics would be better served by allowing the tests, and providing an option for subjects to make their anonymous genomes publicly available for research purposes. And instead of requiring a doctor's approval, send a Ph.D. to explain what the test results really mean - three studies found that people with this polymorphism have an increased risk of the hoobajabbies, but this more recent study found no association, and the effect size in the meta-analysis is weak; plus there's this editorial in Archives that just came out saying the stats in all these studies are bullcrap anyways. So it's inconclusive.

Keith Chen rules. Bumblebee women less so.

I was going to blog about something else, but something really stupid piqued my interest instead.

First, a tour of the science news - British researchers prove once again that size isn't everything - unsurprisingly to us neuroscientists, intelligence seems to have a better correlation to synapse number (the connections between brain cells) and complexity than simple brain size. Leading journal Nature shows it's behind the times (the New York Times, at least) by reporting that an Italian group has shown that monkeys can understand money; Keith Chen has been doing this for years as reported here. Finally, the Swiss have gone bugf#$k nuts, as evidenced by a new law prohibiting the use of research techniques that may sacrifice the dignity of creatures, which apparently includes the dignity of plants.

So on to the stupid part. I was fortunate enough to travel to England in April on the boss' tab, where I spent a couple days with friends before I headed on to a conference. England had some minor culture shock associated with it - but I enjoy drinking in public, arguments, sarcasm, cask ales and so forth. What I don't like, and call me sexist if you will, is women drinking like blue-collar alcoholic middle-aged men (particularly if they have a beer gut to match).

So that helped to explain to me this gem from the BBC, published March 26 2008(!), declaring that drinking during pregnancy might be a bad idea. You would think this was a no-brainer, but apparently not - this British woman gave birth during a pub crawl (any bets on her alcohol intake?), claiming she didn't even know she was pregnant. Tragically, the baby boy weighs only 2 pounds and has about a 50/50 chance of living. No punch line here, folks, unless you count the fact that she was dressed as a bumblebee at the time, which is significantly more sad than funny, p < 0.05.

My brother and I bitch every year that we haven't come anywhere near as far along as some futurists/sci-fi writers believed we would have by this time (It's 2008! Where's my damn flying car?!), but the Brits are just getting around to banning drinking during pregnancy. I guess it's nice to see the colonials pulling ahead of empire... but I still want my friggin' flying car.