The folks at Scientific American have launched “1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days” — a program to bring together scientists, teachers and students to improve America’s “dismal” showing among wealthy countries (27th out of 29) in graduating college students with degrees in science or engineering. I’m sure they mean well — but, at least as it applies to the field of chemistry, “1,000 Unemployed Scientists Living With Their Parents at Age 35 While Working at the Gap” would be a better name.
After earning my PhD, in chemistry, I worked in drug-discovery research for more than 20 years. Aside from being a fascinating profession, it was pretty secure — until the last decade. Then it became anything but.
Why the change? Well, it costs about $1 billion to bring a new drug to market. Blockbuster drugs that bring in multiple billions in profits, such as Lipitor, are needed to support the R&D costs of all other drugs — ones that don’t pan out, and ones that just can’t help enough people to justify the investment before the patent expires. And the patents of almost all current blockbusters are expiring about now, cutting drug companies’ revenues drastically.
Adding to the problem is the Food and Drug Administration, which has become overly restrictive and risk-averse, has made it very difficult (and even more expensive) for companies to bring replacement drugs to market.
To trim expenses, companies began to outsource research to India and China. It started as a trickle, but soon became a tsunami, leaving many thousands of highly intelligent and well-trained professionals with nothing to do — a shameful waste of talent.
My colleagues and I at Wyeth watched helplessly as one company after another shed employees in huge numbers — 300,000 since 2000. When Pfizer — facing the looming expiration of its Lipitor patent and a poor research pipeline — bought Wyeth for its portfolio of products in 2009, it cut about 25,000 jobs, with more to come.
Most of the combined company’s research sites have either closed or are in the process of doing so. Before long, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company will be conducting very little research in the US.
So, what do thousands of unemployed chemists do? Good question. The employment section of the latest (June 13) issue of our trade magazine, Chemical and Engineering News, is hardly promising. It lists a total of one industrial position and two college tenure-track faculty openings in the US. (Of course, there are online sites with more jobs, but the situation there is still bleak).
And good luck finding a high-school teaching job. Last year, one of my old colleagues decided he wanted to teach science in New Jersey — but found out that not a single position was available in the entire state. Previous industry casualties had probably filled the few openings.
It wasn’t always this way. The mid-1990s saw a shortage of chemists, with drug companies hiring like crazy. Bristol-Meyers Squibb, for one, offered cars as signing bonuses. But the company has fired over 10,000 employees since 2000; one wonders if any of them are now living in those cars.
Employment in many industries is cyclical, but in the pharmaceutical industry the cycle has come to a halt. Dozens of smaller drug companies no longer exist, thanks to mergers and takeovers. Site closings usually follow a merger, so research infrastructure is vanishing, too. Labs are shuttered, sold to universities or torn down to save on property taxes and maintenance costs. These are gone for good.
So, what’s my solution? Well, Scientific American could tap 1,000 scientists from the pool of the unemployed and bring them into schools. When the kids keep getting the same answer to the question “Where do you work?” they’ll figure it out.
We don’t need more scientists — not unless there are jobs for them.
Josh Bloom is director of chemical and pharmaceutical sciences at the American Council of Science and Health.