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Hutson's ascent in the face of what would be, by the standards of most other industries, a catastrophic series of disappointments, tells you a lot about the rarefied world of pharmaceutical r&d. Drug discovery is a costly slog in which hundreds of scientists screen tens of thousands of chemicals against specific disease targets. After a remorseless round of testing, most of those compounds will prove to be unstable, unsafe, or otherwise unsuitable for human use. Pfizer spends $152 million a week funding 479 early-stage, preclinical discovery projects; 96% of those efforts will ultimately bomb. In today's show-me-the-money corporate world, drug labs like groton may be unique: Because drug-development projects are parsed out over years and sometimes even decades, and because their rate of attrition is so horrendous, these labs are prisms through which conventional notions of success and failure get stretched and squeezed into strange new shapes. They're also a world in which many of the typical emotional incentives for coming into work each day--the chance to be part of a winning team, to launch a hit new product, to beat a sales target--simply don't apply. |
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