Bureaucracy Buster? Glaxo Lets Scientists Choose Its New Drugs

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

GlaxoSmithKline has made the wild and crazy decision to let its scientists decide which drugs are most promising and thus deserving of funding. From Bureaucracy Buster? Glaxo Lets Scientists Choose Its New Drugs:

Glaxo, the world’s second-largest drug company after Pfizer, based on sales, was created from the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham in 2000. Chief Executive Jean-Pierre Garnier acknowledges that both companies were stumbling in their core business of developing drugs at the time of the merger. And while the merger created a formidable sales and marketing operation, it threatened to burden research with even more bureaucracy at a time when shareholders were pressing for new drugs to replace those losing patent protection.

Of particular concern was the middle stage of drug development. About 80% of potential drugs fail when scientists try to fine-tune rough chemical compounds and turn them into promising medicines ready for large-scale human tests. It’s at this stage that researchers make some of the toughest calls, deciding which products to advance and testing them on animals and small groups of humans for toxicity and early signs of efficacy.

Glaxo used to handle the middle stage like a conveyor belt: Scientists would conduct their specific experiments and then pass the compound on to other scientists for the next step. If any individual step hit a snag, a drug’s development could languish.

Mr. Garnier and Tachi Yamada, Glaxo’s head of research and development, decided to try a different approach to the problem: giving scientists a vested interest in a single drug’s success. To do this, they split middle-stage researchers into seven separate pods of up to 400 people, each concentrating on a specific disease grouping, such as cancer, psychiatry and respiratory and inflammatory diseases.

Today, seven Centers of Excellence for Drug Discovery manage the progression of drugs in the middle of the pipeline. Each group controls its own budget and decides which projects to pursue. Glaxo gives each center funding based on the number of good compounds in its labs, which means the more productive ones get more money. The scientists benefit, too, receiving bonuses if they contribute to the discovery of promising new drugs.

Because it can take up to 10 years to develop a drug, the full impact of Glaxo’s experiment is still unknown. But the number of drugs entering intermediate human trials has tripled over the premerger level, Glaxo says. And the company is expanding into new therapeutic areas where it was once weak, including cancer and cardiology.

Famed Ancient Tortoise Dies in India Zoo

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

Famed Ancient Tortoise Dies in India Zoo:

Addwaita, believed to be the world’s oldest surviving tortoise, aged about 250 years, died in the zoo of liver failure, media reports said Friday, March 26, 2006. He was placed for public show at the zoo since its establishment in 1875, believed brought from Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, by the then British rulers of India.

What Nobodies Know

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Peggy Noonan explains that elites should listen to What Nobodies Know. The leaders partitioning India didn’t:

On Aug. 15, 1947, independence day, in the Punjab, in the city of Amritsar, as local authorities performed the jolly rituals of the transfer of power, a group of local Sikhs went on a rampage in a Muslim neighborhood, killing its male inhabitants. That night, Amritsar’s railroad station became a refugee camp for thousands of Hindus who’d fled what was now Pakistan’s part of the Punjab. As trains arrived, huge crowds scanned the cars for relatives and friends, for children left behind in the flight. Suddenly a train came in but there seemed no one aboard, which was odd. The stationmaster, Chani Singh, waved the train to a halt. The teeming crowd on the platform froze into “an eerie silence.”

From Freedom at Midnight:

Singh stared down the line of eight carriages. All the windows of the compartments were wide open but there was not a single human being standing at any of them. . . . [He] strode to the first carriage, snatched open the door and stepped inside. In one horrible instant he understood why no one was getting off the Ten Down Express in Amritsar that night. It was a trainful of corpses. The floor of the compartment before him was a tangled jumble of human bodies, throats cut, skulls smashed, bowels eviscerated. Arms, legs, trunks of bodies were strewn along the corridors of compartments.

Her conclusion:

The leaders of the day did not know that terrible violence was coming because of what I think is a classic and structural problem of leadership: It distances. Each of these men was to varying degrees detached from facts on the ground. They were by virtue of their position and accomplishments an elite. They no longer knew what was beating within the hearts of those who lived quite literally on the ground. Nehru, Mountbatten, Jinnah — they well knew that Muslims feared living under the rule of the Hindus, that Hindus feared living under Muslims, that Sikhs feared both. But the leaders did not know the fear that was felt was so deep, so constitutional, so passionate. They did not know it would find its expression in a savagery so wild and widespread.

Classy Economist

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Classy Economist looks at “black conservative” economist Thomas Sowell and his views on race:

“The left likes to portray a group as sort of a creature of surrounding society. But that’s not true. For example, back during the immigrant era, you had neighborhoods on the Lower East Side [of Manhattan] where Jews and Italians arrived at virtually identical times. Lived in the same neighborhoods. Kids sat side by side in the same schools. But totally different outcomes. Now, if you look back at the history of the Jews and the history of the Italians you can see why that would be. In the early 19th century, Russian officials report that even the poorest Jews find some way to get some books in their home, even though they’re living in a society where over 90% of the people are illiterate.

“Conversely, in southern Italy, which is where most Italian-Americans originated, when they put in compulsory school-attendance laws, there were riots. There were schoolhouses burning down. So now you take these two kids and sit them side by side in a school. If you believe that environment means the immediate surroundings, they’re in the same environment. But if you believe environment includes this cultural pattern that goes back centuries before they were born, then no, they’re not in the same environment. They don’t come into that school building with the same mindset. And they don’t get the same results.”

On classical economics:

Free-market economics, a legacy of the classical school, is thought of as an old conservative doctrine. But Mr. Sowell explains that it was in fact one of the most revolutionary concepts to emerge in the history of ideas. Moreover, “the thinking of the classical economist was not only a radical break from landmark intellectual figures like Plato and Machiavelli but also from mainstream thinking to this day.” The notion of a self-equilibrating system — the market economy — meant a reduced role for intellectuals and politicians, he says. “And even today many still haven’t accepted that their superior wisdom might be superfluous, if not damaging.”

Fighting Words

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

In Fighting Words, Victor Davis Hanson lists “the definitive books on the battles of the 20th century”:

  1. The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne (St. Martin’s, 1963)
  2. With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge (Presidio, 1981)
  3. The Face of Battle by John Keegan (Viking, 1976)
  4. Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 1998)
  5. The Fall of Fortresses by Elmer Bendiner (Putnam, 1980)

Orphaned baby tigers stumble out of Siberian forest

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Orphaned baby tigers stumble out of Siberian forest:

Two wild baby tigers, orphaned and famished, scrambled out of a Siberian forest in eastern Russia and into the hands of startled loggers, the Russian ministry of natural resources said.

The two female tigers — one seriously wounded — offered practically no resistance as the loggers took them into captivity about 50 kilometers from the fishing village of Ternei, north of Vladivostok.

Officials called in from the Amur nature reserve for the protection of tigers examined the exhausted cubs, one of which succumbed to its injuries soon thereafter.

“The state of the wounded tiger got worse and it was decided to send both animals to a veterinarian clinic in the village of Razdolny near Vladivostok,” explained Vitali Starostine, a special “tiger” inspection officer in the reserve.

“But the trip of nearly 700 kilometers proved too taxing for the little animal, and she died,” he said.

“The second tiger is in good health and she withstood the trip well. She is exhausted and will need medical care for about a month,” Starostine said.

A search for the mother of the cubs proved fruitless, and officials suspected that she had been fatally wounded or killed.

There remain only 500 tigers in the wilds of the Amur region in Russia’s far east. About a dozen of them fall victim to poachers every year, according the World Wildlife Fund.

(Note: The tiger cub pictured is from the Berlin Zoo.)

Ingrates to Their Very Souls

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

James Taranto calls the rescued Christian Peacemaker Teams Ingrates to Their Very Souls:

There is a whole strange worldview at work here — a theology, if you will. We don’t claim to understand it fully, but it seems to equate America as the root of all evil and America’s adversaries as Edenic creatures — innocents who know not good or evil and thus bear no culpability for their bad actions.

If we have this right, it follows that the CPT Christians see themselves, by virtue of their faith, as being forgiven for being American, or for being from another nation that America has corrupted. This is why they cannot be grateful to, or forgiving of, America: For them that would amount to thanking or forgiving sin itself.

Baby Pygmy Hippo

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Even ugly animals have cute babies:

A three-month-old baby pygmy hippopotamus swims by his grazing mother at Henry Doorly Zoo Friday, March 24, 2006, in Omaha, Neb. Zoo visitors will be able to view the baby hippo for the first time on Friday.

V is for Read the Book Instead

Friday, March 24th, 2006

I still haven’t seen V for Vendetta. Iain Murray says, V is for Read the Book Instead.

Literary Self-Help

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Cynthia Crossen finds Literary Self-Help in Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life:

Obviously, I am in a tiny minority of Americans who find more relief from life’s travails in Gustav Flaubert, Edith Wharton and George Orwell than Wayne Dyer, Rick Warren and Dr. Phil. But I couldn’t have explained my habit of turning to old-fashioned, long-dead novelists for comfort and counsel until I read Mr. de Botton’s 1997 encomium to Marcel Proust written in the form of a self-help manual. It turns out that In Search of Lost Time (Or Remembrance of Things Past, as the title is often translated), published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, addresses such eternal — if self-centered — lamentations as, “Why do I suffer?” and “How should I express my emotions?” and “Why can’t I be happy in love?”

I knew nothing of Proust’s personal life before reading How Proust Can Change Your Life. In many ways, the man was a mess. When he wasn’t physically ill — and he usually was — Proust was a snobbish insomniac and hypochondriac who couldn’t abide fresh air or sunlight. His love for men was mostly unrequited. His relationship with his mother was infantile well into his adulthood. “While it is clear why someone might be interested in developing a Proustian approach to life,” Mr. de Botton comments, “the sane would never harbor a desire to lead a life like Proust’s.”

Yet with his almost supernatural sensitivity to human relationships (as well as ordinary objects like biscuits called madeleines), Proust explained in poetic detail how and why people behave as they do, and, Mr. de Botton demonstrates, how they might feel and behave better. “Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, In Search of Lost Time is a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.”

Unfortunately for the typically overscheduled citizen of the modern world, Proust needed 3,000 pages to do the job that ordinary self-help writers do in a few hundred. Proust’s own brother Robert bemoaned the “sad thing” that “people have to be very ill or have broken a leg” to read In Search of Lost Time.” An esteemed Parisian publisher confessed to a friend, “I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs 30 pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.” Proust ended up using his own money to publish the books.

For those of us without lingering illnesses or brittle bones, Mr. de Botton, with humor and cunning, distills Proust’s insights into 197 pages without reducing them to so many fortune cookies.

Island Wisdom, Coded in Java

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Island Wisdom, Coded in Java explains how Charles Armstrong, fed up with cubicle hell, developed a new communication tool based on what he learned on a tiny island:

So in 1999 he set out to conduct an ethnographic study of how people naturally communicate and organize when shorn of externalities like e-mail and PowerPoint. His quest took him to the tiny island of St. Agnes, the smallest of the Isles of Scilly, 28 miles off the coast of Britain. He lived there for a year, studying how the 80-or-so island villagers interacted and functioned.

Not surprisingly, life on the island contrasted powerfully with the corporate culture of London business. ‘Looking at how people schedule tasks and priorities, in most conventional organizations people make a to-do list, then they will do the highest-priority things first,’ he says. ‘On St. Agnes, somebody wakes up, has breakfast, walks out the door and looks up at the sky…. If it looks like the right kind of wind and tide to catch a kind of fish they like, they might just do that first.’

That same fluidity extended to communications, says Armstrong, with unexpected efficiency. If Friday’s boat from St. Mary was canceled, there might be six people in the village that needed to know. Armstrong found consistently they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and few uninterested people would be burdened with the knowledge.
[...]
Called Trampoline, the program will integrate with a company’s existing desktop and enterprise server applications, sitting quietly on a company’s network and vacuuming in e-mail, files, spreadsheets and anything else it can find.

From there, Trampoline indexes the data by parameters like authorization, originator and destination, and scours it for “semantic triggers” — interesting words that tend to crop up a lot. Then, like a village gossip, it shares information with people who might have use for it within the organization.

Brick by Brick: Lego’s New Building Blocks

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

Brick by Brick: Lego’s New Building Blocks describes Lego’s new Lego Factory initiative:

Customers create any structure they can imagine using Lego’s freely downloadable Digital Designer software. If they then decide to actually build their creation, the software, which keeps track of which pieces are required, sends the order to this corner of the Enfield warehouse. There, employees put all the pieces (which are grouped in standardized bags) into a box, along with instructions, and ship it off.

A Plan to Replace the Welfare State

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

Charles Murray, the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. In A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, he introduces his ideas:

Instead of sending taxes to Washington, straining them through bureaucracies and converting what remains into a muddle of services, subsidies, in-kind support and cash hedged with restrictions and exceptions, just collect the taxes, divide them up, and send the money back in cash grants to all American adults. Make the grant large enough so that the poor won’t be poor, everyone will have enough for a comfortable retirement, and everyone will be able to afford health care. We’re rich enough to do it.
[..]
There are many ways of turning these economic potentials into a working system. The one I have devised — I call it simply “the Plan” for want of a catchier label — makes a $10,000 annual grant to all American citizens who are not incarcerated, beginning at age 21, of which $3,000 a year must be used for health care. Everyone gets a monthly check, deposited electronically to a bank account. If we implemented the Plan tomorrow, it would cost about $355 billion more than the current system. The projected costs of the Plan cross the projected costs of the current system in 2011. By 2020, the Plan would cost about half a trillion dollars less per year than conservative projections of the cost of the current system. By 2028, that difference would be a trillion dollars per year.

Let Computers Screen Air Baggage

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

Security expert Bruce Schneier says Let Computers Screen Air Baggage:

It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently, testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts. It makes you wonder why we’re all putting our laptops in a separate bin and taking off our shoes. (Although we should all be glad that Richard Reid wasn’t the ‘underwear bomber.’)

Airport security is mind-numbing:

Airport screeners have a difficult job, primarily because the human brain isn’t naturally adapted to the task. We’re wired for visual pattern matching, and are great at picking out something we know to look for — for example, a lion in a sea of tall grass.

But we’re much less adept at detecting random exceptions in uniform data. Faced with an endless stream of identical objects, the brain quickly concludes that everything is identical and there’s no point in paying attention. By the time the exception comes around, the brain simply doesn’t notice it. This psychological phenomenon isn’t just a problem in airport screening: It’s been identified in inspections of all kinds, and is why casinos move their dealers around so often. The tasks are simply mind-numbing.

It’s Like Lending to a Friend, Except You’ll Get Interest

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

It’s Like Lending to a Friend, Except You’ll Get Interest:

Prosper.com, a start-up company based in San Francisco, started operations last week, offering a mixed brew of eBay, Friendster and the local bank.
[...]
On Prosper.com, prospective borrowers register with the site and allow the company to review their credit history. Then borrowers post a loan request of up to $25,000, along with an upper limit for the amount of interest they are willing to pay. Loans are not secured by collateral and are paid off over three years at a fixed rate, with no prepayment penalty.

Lenders essentially deposit their money with Prosper — which holds it in an interest-bearing account with Wells Fargo — and either review the loan requests individually or fill out a form permitting Prosper to allocate money to borrowers who meet certain criteria.

Chief among those criteria is the borrower’s rating from the credit reporting bureau Experian, but borrowers can also join or create groups with defined interests or characteristics that, they hope, will make them more attractive to some lenders.

Among the groups on Prosper are aficionados of the Porsche 914 model, associates and employees of a Berkeley cafe and Vietnamese-American students. Borrowers, who typically post their loan requests and any group affiliation, along with a description of who they are and why they need the money, then wait a maximum of two weeks for lenders to bid in ever-lower interest increments for the right to issue the loan.

To help lenders minimize risk, Prosper permits them to finance just part of a given loan, so a typical lender may offer, say, $100 at 6.5 percent interest toward a loan to someone with excellent credit.

Once the bidding is complete, and if enough lenders bid enough money to finance the loan at a single rate acceptable to the borrower, Prosper transfers the money to the borrower’s account and establishes a monthly repayment system that withdraws money from the borrower’s checking account. (Should a borrower default, Prosper hires a collection company on the lender’s behalf and alerts credit bureaus.)