The 99%

Big Pharma is, in my opinion, one of the most misunderstood industries. At least as it applies to 99% of the people. There is a certain stigma that comes with working for Big Pharma where people tend to assume that you have some character flaw or that you are simply in it for the money. I won’t lie, those people do exist. During my time at GSK, they were in the midst of a bribery scandal in China that ultimately ended with a $490 million fine against the company. The recent Mylan Epi-Pen scandal and the whole Martin Shkreli debacle have again cast the Pharma industry in a more negative light.

In my experience, however, scientists enter the pharmaceutical industry because they want to help people. These are people who know that they will never see the outrageous salaries afforded to the executive businessmen and women at the top. But like it or not, big pharma is still the most viable way to bring new, potentially life-saving drugs to the market. This is what the vast majority of people work for. And they do this knowing that failure is the most likely outcome (especially at the earlier phases of drug development). Upon discussing this with my mentors, they said 99% of chemists working in drug discovery will never work on a drug that makes it all the way through to the market. They do this because they a) love what they do and b) have the chance, however slight, to make a tremendous impact on the world.

For me, it’s really a “one bad apple ruins the bunch” situation. The executives at the top are the few that have the ungodly salaries (the CEO at GSK made $10 million per year plus bonuses) and really benefit from any unsavory tactics used to sell medications. These people usually have backgrounds in economics and business and scientists almost never fill these rolls. If there were more scientists at the top, I think there would be far less corruption and the industry itself would look very different. This also relates to how the expectation on pharmaceutical industry is different from all other industries, but that is a discussion for another time.

Ultimately, 99% of people don’t go into Big Pharma looking to make huge amounts of money at the expense of the populace. Most are well-intentioned people who are often seen as wearing a Martin Shkreli mask.