BIG POTATOES

In our cynical, short-attention-span age, it has become imperative to rally to the defence of pure, basic, long-term research. R&D isn’t just D. Without aggressive R, there will be no major, new or surprising industries.

Governments and business have steadily backed off from investing in pure research. A key moment, perhaps, came in 1993, when the US Congress cancelled plans for a Superconducting Super Collider facility in Texas.

Today, even a research project like Europe’s Large Hadron Collider feels called upon to say that one of its byproducts may be new science, ‘that can be applied almost immediately’. [1]

James Woudhuysen argues that the biopharmaceuticals giant Pfizer’s decision earlier this year to close the company’s labs in Sandwich, south-east England, exposed the Lib-Con coalition government’s lack of any strategy for growth. Analysing the trends in pharmaceutical research and societal attitudes to it over the last fifty years he argues that:

The agenda in society today is much more about nudging you to change your diet or your exercise than it is about having hopes that they will come up with wonder drugs. That agenda supplies the real, overarching and dominant context behind the drive, by big pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, to get out of research.

Big Pharma, small ambition, James Woudhuysen, spiked, 21 February 2011