Column: In the pipeline

Does it matter whether or not a pharmaceutical company is run by a chemist, asks Derek Lowe

If you're a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, your immediate supervisor is almost certainly a chemist as well. That usually works out fairly well, because they're able to understand when you have difficulties in the lab and can properly value your achievements when things work out. That's the theory, at least, although these goals aren't always realised in practice. Still, the average chemist will probably do a better job managing other chemists than the average lawyer would. 

But when you look at the smaller set of people higher up the managerial ladder, this rule breaks down. At some point you come to the highest-ranking chemist in the organisation, and that point is usually short of the top. Not very many chemists are running drug companies - for that matter, not many biologists are, either. Most of the big bosses are holders of MBA and MD degrees, as far as I can tell. Given the high proportion of scientists employed in our industry, it's hard not to think that we're a bit underrepresented in the highest ranks. 

Decisions, decisions 

One reason for this is that a drug company CEO isn't really making decisions on scientific issues. In a company of any size, the research has already been argued over by the time something makes it to the executive offices. Once the company has made a commitment to work in, say, oncology, it's going to find itself with the clinical targets and the drug candidates decided on by people far lower down the ladder. The CEO may well decide that the company should move into some whole new therapeutic area, for example, but those are usually as much business decisions as scientific ones. 

Another reason is that scientists don't have a good reputation as managers of people. This is an unflattering cliché, to be sure, but there's a reason that these things get to be clichés. Admittedly, there is no shortage of bad managers in any given population. But there's a personality type that's seen a bit more often in the hard sciences, one that's more comfortable with data and ideas than with other people. As new hires, these types can find themselves managing an associate or two before they've even figured out what they're doing with their own time, and some of them never quite get the hang of it. They can be impatient about ideas that don't work out, and if that happens after they've farmed some of their own out to their subordinates, the situation can become unpleasant. 

Lust for glory 

There's also a more neutral explanation for the lack of top-dog chemists. Not many people find themselves running huge swaths of a business by accident - most of the people at these levels are very ambitious indeed, and have been so for a very long time. They made a choice at some point to go as high as they possibly could in running the business. Ambitious scientists tend to aim for a different sort of target - the chance to give their own ideas greater scope, to get a group of people to work on the things they think should be worked on, the way they should be worked on. The business and administrative sides of management - budgets, performance reviews, head counts - are something to be put up with to get to those good parts. But to someone working their way up the business side, those are the good parts (or at least the main parts). 

Either way, the higher your rank in an organisation, the more your job is about making decisions. The sorts of decisions that get handled at the top are often ones that many scientists wouldn't enjoy having to make, because (by lab standards) they all have to proceed with insufficient data. Those who aspire to the very top find this exhilarating - but most decide that irreproducible data is better generated on a smaller scale. 

Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on preclinical drug discovery in the US