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The
Personal Touch
Bruce
Flickinger
Pharmaceutical Formulation & Quality
June 22, 1999
It
is a colorful and intriguing product, with a huge, laminated
game board, player pieces that are vials of "tablets"
and question-and-answer cards representing numerous disciplines
and situations one might actually encounter in a drug
company.
We
began to play a few rounds. It quickly became apparent
that our knowledge of the inner workings of the drug industry
was admirable in some areas and virtually non-existent
in others.
This
note was sounded time and again during research for this
month's cover story on contract laboratories and research
organizations, which are often tapped for the collective
experience of their staffs. This can be an area of vulnerability
in some drug companies, where senior-level researchers
are highly specialized and limited to specific endeavors,
and junior-level bench people tend to "read recipes"
without much thought to the final dish or the interaction
of its ingredients.
I've
heard first-hand over the years about these sorts of scenarios,
even from Ph.D.-level chemists who labor long hours without
any real sense of their place in the grand scheme of things,
and always with the specter of deadlines, and their ominous
impact on corporate profitably, looming over them. This
can create a stultifying atmosphere in which one does
what one is told without questioning why or offering how
to do it better, whereas the emphasis, as Morris says,
should be "on fostering problem solving, risk taking
and decision making skills."
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