Waving the Flag

Let's not forget, and let's feel proud about, how important our day-to-day work is for improving the health, welfare, and lives of humankind, whether we work in industry, government, or non-governmental organizations. [Continue]

Greetings and welcome to ZBI's modernized web site. Putting the site together over the past few months, I've had to review and reflect on how I've spent my time since 1998 when ZBI was founded and what I've learned these past eight years.

The most important thing that I've learned is (and I think this will hold true for you if you work in R&D and clinical trials) that I, and all of us in the pharma and biotech worlds whether we work in industry, government, or non-profit spheres, are helping other people. We're working day in and day out to help people feel healthier, feel better, and live longer. Our success is measured by the extra years of life a baby born today will enjoy compared to 25 years ago when I started in this business or, for you, whenever you started. Part of that longer, better life is due to our collective efforts. OK-it's a not a perfect world and commercial pressures make it easy to forget that our jobs and our work are about helping people but the fact of the matter is that all of us feel satisfaction from that, and we should.

Our dedication to the public welfare and public health was, to tell the truth, something that became obscured for me over the years. In graduate school in the '70s and when I started in the pharma industry in the '80s, the fact that I was laboring for more than a better stock price for my employer kept me motivated. Somehow that aspect of my motivation shrunk over the years.

What reminded how important our work is, whether or not there's a stock price associated with it?

Well, over the past five years I've spent hours and days devoted to industry consortia and standards development and very often, sitting at the same table, were people from government, including the regulators. After years in industry, they were the "other side" for me, the demanding, skeptical other side that so often seemed to just not understand what our clinical development program was all about. In these consortia meetings, at these tables and discussions, I appreciated that that other side is the side of public welfare and public health. I am almost embarrassed to say that after hours discussing standards development for regulatory submissions with regulators, I appreciate just a bit the burden they have when a new product is approved and how seriously they take that burden. Working to keep the stock price up is nothing compared to working to protect and enhance the health and well-being of the 290 million people in the United States today, and the generations yet to be born. Those meetings and those discussions reminded me to be proud of the work that I, and we, have done, are doing, and will do to get safe and effective medicine not just to market, but to the people that need it.