Bacon and Eggs
The great Northern cities of England grew out of the world’s first industrial revolution and its specialisations for Cotton (Manchester), Wool (Bradford), Ships (Newcastle) and other products. The Universities, often started and funded by successful Victorian entrepreneurs to do research to devise newer products, also contributed to better educational opportunities for many and the growth of new knowledge that improved health care, nutrition and the environment. They and their founders saw themselves as Civic Universities, adding to the culture of the city as well as its wealth. They committed their time, energy, knowledge and innovation to their local citizens, and they did it because that is what they were for.
Today’s Universities operate as businesses, selling their time, energy, knowledge and innovation to their fellow citizens for as much as they can get. They compete with real businesses. They may say that they are Civic Universities, and they may appear to be involved in the life of their city, but they don’t show the commitment of their predecessors. They may be involved, but they are not committed.
An investor of mine once explained the difference between involvement and commitment when I had said something about “being involved” in the new business we were launching. “Involvement’s no good to me”, he said, “I need commitment. Just like with Bacon and Eggs, the Hen may be involved, but the Pig is committed”.
Walled Gardens
There is a nice quote in Wikinomics which I like, particularly the bit about walled gardens
The quote is largely referring to new-style on-line business and the importance of engaging users and helping them to establish communities, but it seems to me that this is also very relevant advice for the modern University. Universities make money from Teaching, Research and Technology Transfer. They are usually good at teaching and can turn a profit, because they generally know what they are doing. Research Contracts bring in cash, although less than they might if they got their overheads down. However, most Universities lose money from spin-out and licensing, and this is bad for them, bad for the academics and most importantly, it is very bad for the community in which they live.
Why is this? They build Walled Gardens.
Heroes and Villains
I am part way through watching Series 3 of “Heroes”, and enjoying the interesting twists of character and plot. For those that don’t know it, the basic premise is that an unusual set of genetic mutations have produced new kinds of individuals that are able to suspend the laws of physics and fly, move in time, read minds, or whatever else the scriptwriters can come up with in time for the next episode. Very enjoyable stuff, even if (or because of) the science being so “creative”. Still, where would popular culture be without warp drive and inertial dampeners? The latest series has an interesting twist in that some of the Heroes of the first and second series are now turning into Villains and some of the Villains are becoming Heroes. Even so, I still don’t buy the argument that Syler should be let off his conduct (i.e. slicing off the skulls of his victims in order to suck out the brains) in the earlier series, just because he has an eating disorder and his mother had him adopted. So it is getting confusing and unsettling, but very watchable.
When it comes to the Pharmaceutical industry and health care, popular culture has no such uncertainty about who is the hero and who is the villain. The litany of complaint is well known. Drug companies extort obscene profits from the sick, corrupt honest scientists and doctors through bribes, abuse the poor of the third world as human guinea pigs, and force dangerous, untested new drugs on us. We know that because we read it in the news and watch films like “the Fugitive” and “the Compleat Gardener”.
Still, it’s only entertainment, no harm done, and anyway, everyone knows who is the villain …
Inkspot Steps Up
We are now working with the first closed Beta version of the Inkspot Science on demand site as well as the workflow design desktop client that currently acts as an IDE for adding services, managing data and sharing both. The Inkspot desktop client is a very nice implementation of a workflow design tool that makes it easy to build workflows from standard blocks and manage these on the Inkspot server. We have been adding specialist blocks for data mining and cheminformatics and plan to extend these depending on what the beta test users need. I particularly like the scripting block which lets me write simple R scripts which are implemented using an Rserve server on the Inkspot site. The (currently) small number of blocks for cheminformatics were added using a few bits of the CDK toolkit along with some charting, modelling and data manipulation tools. We are expecting to be adding a great deal more in the near future connected with research projects that we are keen to support and would be happy to work with collaborator groups to tailor the content, particularly if those groups would be willing to help us improve the site and help us direct its development.
The server site has a simplified version of the workflow editor as well as a “lab notebook” blogging mechanism that makes it easy to add scientific content such as data, workflows, references and so on. This is an early focus of what we are doing to simplify the process of data analysis and communication. Of course the site allows the user to form groups and share objects, although the default is private. We have two major research collaborations already underway and I hope to be able to say more about both soon. Although it is early days for us, we the site is making excellent progress and we are excited about the prospects in the coming year.
If you have a research project that could benefit from using Inkspot as a hosting and collaboration mechanism, or if you’d like to use the site in your business get in touch and we will arrange a web demo and conversation.
The Winner’s Curse
Most of us mix up the meaning of Biotech and Pharma since both do pretty much the same thing, invent new drugs. We tend to use Pharma to describe the FIDDCO, i.e. a fully integrated Drug Discovery and Development Company, whereas Biotech companies are more likely to be emergent and on some pathway towards full integration, driven by their own research. But as I remember it, Biotech was originally used to describe the new “big molecule” companies inspired by the early success of Amgen and Genentech from inventing protein drugs. However, when this early success was hard to reproduce, most biotechs stuck to the small classical organic molecules which still dominate clinical practice. This is now changing, as the majors move to acquire or develop a protein drug component for their pipelines. Some argue that we are likely to see protein drugs as 50% of Pharma pipelines, indeed with the acquisitions of CAT and Medimmune, AstraZeneca now has 27% of its current pipeline as proteins and that’s a big change for a company that grew out of manufacturing paints and dyestuffs.
Why is this happening now? No doubt the science has improved and people have gained much more experience in the technologies required to develop and manufacture proteins to the demanding standards required of a new drug, but there are also significant commercial drivers, proteins are expensive and the technology barrier to cloning by generics is higher.
If this continues there will be big changes coming …
The Borg
You know the Borg, probably the best of the Star Trek villains, and famous for their catch phrases “You must comply. You will be assimilated”. No ifs, no buts, no negotiation. You’d think that if the Borg really had assimilated the knowledge and culture of thousands of species, at least one could have added a few inter-personal skills. I think of the Borg whenever I hear someone say “You must protect your IP” to somebody trying to start a business. Usually this is offered as a piece of of unquestionable wisdom, no ifs, no buts, no negotiation.
You will have this mantra rammed into you if ever you raise your head above the parapet with the glimmer of a new business idea. For academics, the fount of science-based business ideas, this is doubly true and may well be written into contracts, along with other threatening statements about conflict of interest, which are intended to protect the University, but simply end up putting people off the whole idea. The logical consequence is that the academic should not openly publish and communicate their ideas. They should not freely collaborate with other scientists, especially those in business, at least not without all the paraphenalia of confidentiality agreements and contracts. It is easy to argue against this from a happy clappy, let’s all share for the good of science perspective, that this is not a good thing. That won’t get you far against the Borg though.
Automating Science
Of course scientists try to be objective and rational, but are only human. So when someone says they can automate what scientists do, and the decisions they make, when those decisions are derived from years of study and practical experience, it doesn’t go down very well. So I am going to get myself in trouble and might have to leave.
I think we can automate much of what many scientists do in software. I think that when we do that right, quality improves.
I’ll get my coat.
The Gilman Test
Over dinner the other night, a very experienced Pharmaceutical Industry executive asked me one of those awkward questions people reserve for the second bottle of wine.
“Why is drug discovery productivity so low when so much is spent on new technology like combi-chem, High Throughput Screening, protein structure determination, etcetera, etcetera?”
I said that I didn’t know, because the scientists I meet in Pharma companies are still the clever hard-working, high integrity people they always were. I said I thought that the size and complexity of large organisations and management obsessed with “process change” and “work smarter” initiatives that get people working on things other than drug discovery was ultimately a sign of weakness and was probably part of the problem.
I spent several (wasted) years of my life actively engaged in this kind of large company “strategic change initiative” which meant I was permanently on planes heading to window-less rooms in bland hotels where a group of us middle rank managers would “brainstorm” and “envision” the future, led by some charming facilitator with post-it pads and flip charts, organising us into break-out groups and workshops. It was all very exciting to start with. It felt like being part of the chosen ones, changing the future. It took me a few rounds of this to realise that the organisation was in love with the change process, not the change itself. It got to the point where I could keep the slide pack from one change initiative and recycle them in the next. My contacts in the industry tell me that this obsession with process change continues. I offered to lend them my slide packs from 10 years ago, but I think the jargon needs updating.
I quit when I couldn’t face the thought of another “brown paper brainstorming”. I still have an allergic reaction to flip charts and post-it’s.
Mostly though, I quit because I didn’t think what I was doing passed the Gilman Test.
University Based Drug Discovery
Should Universities engage in drug discovery, as opposed to basic research into the causes of disease? I have often heard it argued that they shouldn’t, in fact I probably said it myself in the years before I found the escape tunnel out of AstraZeneca. i think this is a common view amongst people in the industry, in fact a colleague of mine (an experienced and successful medicinal chemist working in a University) was told by an industry scientist that what he was doing was immoral.
Big Switch, Small Apology
A number of interesting comments have been left over the last few days, but I owe an apology to the posters in being so slow to approve them. I have an excuse, which I will offer further down the page, but it gives me an opportunity to write about something I am interested in. It comes out of another book which I enjoyed reading recently called the Big Switch by Nick Carr. The book is a good read and takes some well known ideas and, with good examples, argues that computing will become a commodity provided by utilities. The analogy he draws is with the electrical industry which was originally based on selling private generation units. I didn’t know this, but apparently Thomas Edison’s business model was to sell electricity generators to businesses and that is what sustained the early growth of the industry. It wasn’t until the costs of distribution started to fall and the switch to AC that this model was overtaken by that of the electricity company as a utility. Now of course we just expect to be able to plug in and get the power we need when we need it. So the developments in on demand and cloud computing look to him like the same “big switch” where computing resource becomes a commodity, provided by big utilities such as we are seeing with Amazon and others. So in this new world the idea that an organisation will have its own computers and software managed locally will seem as archaic as a company deciding to have its own power generation facilities. Of course this requires something of a culture shift for people to decide to do their work and store their data “in the cloud”, particularly where that data is critical to the business or maybe the academic reputation of the scientist. So why is this relevant to my feeble excuse for not approving comments for several days? Read on …
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