The Call of Commerce: Former Academics Cite Advantages in Industry

The excitement of turning theory into therapeutics...The opportunity to focus on research, without the distractions of committee work...The prospect of advancing one's career without navigating the tenure process...The chance to collaborate, rather than carve an individual niche...The potential for greater remuneration--if the science proves marketable... A host of reasons prompts scientists to ponder switching from academia to industry--whether as start-up employee, biotech entrepreneur, or Big Pharma scientific director. These reasons tend to be unique to each person's situation. But two underlying forces may be at the roots of these personal choices, which both surveys and stories indicate more scientists are making. Rolf F. Lehming, director of the integrated studies program at the National Science Foundation's division of science resources studies, thinks a "push and pull" phenomenon has driven the trend. The "push," posits Lehming, comes from academic hiring-- or lack thereof. Academic hiring has slowed considerably since a boom beginning in the 1960s. "In the early '70s, academia employed 55 percent of all doctoral scientists and engineers in the [United States]," Lehming says. "That's now down to about 46 percent." The rate of hiring new, full-time professors in universities flattened in the '90s--with only enough new hires to replace retiring faculty members. The "pull" comes from the growth of industry, which, along with other sectors, has been picking up some of the slack. Industry employed about 24 percent of all full-time doctoral scientists and engineers in the early '70s, according to NSF data. That number crept up to 29 percent in 1995, the latest year for which NSF has figures. Those numbers, from the NSF's biannual Survey of Doctoral Recipients, do not include postdocs or part-time scientists. Lehming notes that the survey encompassed a labor pool of 434,000 scientists for 1995, so a shift of a few percentage points represents a fairly substantial change in employment trends. TOUGH CHOICE: Vertex Pharmaceuticals' Vicki Sato left Harvard University for an industry job when she realized she would probably have to go to another university if she wanted to achieve tenure. Both pushes and pulls prompted Vicki L. Sato, senior vice president of research and development and chief scientific officer for Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cambridge, Mass., to leave an associate professor position at Harvard University in 1984 for an industrial job. Sato was happy at Harvard. She enjoyed her colleagues, her students, her research. There was just one problem: "They weren't going to give me tenure," Sato recalls. Sato took the Harvard position after postdocs at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, knowing that she probably wouldn't get tenure at the Ivy League institution. Most young professors join the Harvard faculty knowing that they will likely have to leave to earn tenure--and fame--at another university, Sato explains. If they succeed, some eventually make their way back to Massachusetts. The pull came from biotech, which she felt was coalescing around her--outside the halls of academia. "It's not every day that you can get involved in the formation of a new industry." Sato admits departing from academia was a tough decision. She emphasizes that she posted a successful academic record: "I didn't leave because I couldn't get grants." Still, in the back of her mind, when she took that first position with Biogen Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech firm, she thought she could always return to academia, as long as she didn't stay away too long. Looking back, she hasn't regretted the move, even though she admits the two sectors seem sometimes like separate worlds. "There are obviously some pretty fundamental differences," Sato acknowledges, explaining that all research in industry ultimately relates to products. "The purpose of the work is different." However, she continues, that difference in purpose does not detract from the quality of science--even though some academic scientists look down on industrial research. Some aspects of commercial research are actually stronger, Sato maintains. "It's much more interdisciplinary," she says of her efforts heading teams developing therapies for a variety of diseases. "Academics talk about being interdisciplinary, but they tend to be a little more independent and insular." Close collaboration results in a greater sense of urgency, as teams of scientists work to get drugs to the next stage of clinical trials and, eventually, to market. "Things move fast. They have to move fast. It's life or death." That combination of science and commerce may not be to everyone's liking, Sato admits. But she found she thrives on it. "I really like the intersection of science and business. The challenge is to figure out the best scientific strategy to make drugs that are useful." Industry's not for everyone, say two scientists who left academic posts in hopes of having more time for research. Joan Brugge, professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School, was lured away from an earlier research post as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. While at Penn, Brugge tried to focus on a field that intrigued her: receptor- and oncogene-induced intracellular signaling pathways. However, she had difficulty doing so, due to a myriad of responsibilities. "Eighty percent of my time was in little parcels, including committees, study sections, curriculum meetings, grant reviews, fellowship reviews," Brugge remembers. "I wasn't getting much satisfaction in those 1-percent parcels of my time." DIVIDED TIME: Harvard's Joan Brugge took a biotech position because her earlier university post divided her time among committee work--leaving little room for research. She thought she would have more time to focus on cellular signaling research at ARIAD Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Cambridge, and have the bonus of translating research findings into therapeutic applications, since the small signaling domains involved in many disease processes seemed like good specific targets for structure-based drug design. Joining a company would allow her to devote more time to cutting-edge research in this area, she thought. However, instead of lab hours, management, administration, and traveling consumed most of the scientific director's time. One of the first rules of young biotech firms, she learned, is that they need the support of corporate partnerships. Getting that support drained her. "It was difficult for me because of the amount of time and energy necessary." Still, she continued her basic research, funded by the National Cancer Institute, and tried to follow the research that her scientific colleagues were pursuing at ARIAD. Eventually, she realized she was engaged in the same juggling act that triggered her to leave academia. "Finally, after five years, I realized it wasn't feasible to do research at the level of quality I was comfortable with and also to be scientific director." Christian R.H. Raetz left a biochemistry professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a position at the Whitehouse, N.J.-based Merck & Co. Inc. for reasons similar to Brugge's. While at Wisconsin, he had studied the biochemistry of lipids, which form the structure of cell membranes. During that time, he and colleagues discovered 10 new enzymes that make lipid A, the major outer membrane lipid of E. coli. He started wondering about the function of these enzymes in bacteria. Then, in 1987, he received an offer from Merck to investigate these enzymes as drug targets in a search for new antibiotics. The company agreed to hire his entire 10-person lab. Raetz relished the thought of tackling a new challenge in what he recalls was a very supportive environment, with great equipment and competent colleagues. "Merck was like going to medical school and graduate school again." He also acknowledges being tempted by the financial incentives. "It was the proverbial offer I couldn't refuse." As Raetz became more involved with developing a potential antibiotic, he found himself climbing through the ranks, eventually heading a staff of 450 people. He became caught between science and administration. "The academic equivalent is a dean trying to run a lab," he says. He found himself wanting to return to science and teaching, eventually accepting an offer in 1993, and he is now George Barth Geller professor and chairman of biochemistry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. The journey from academia to industry and back has been valuable, since working with the company taught him to concentrate on one problem closely, Raetz remarks. While at UW-Madison, Raetz's work explored several lipid pathways from a variety of organisms and included genomic work as well as biochemical study. At Merck, his research became more narrowly defined. He now concentrates solely on the biochemistry of the lipid A pathway. Raetz says this renewed sense of focus--and opportunity to do hands-on science--justified his move back to academia: "It wasn't a brilliant move financially, but it's the right job." Sato also notes that industrial scientists tend to have more resources than their academic colleagues, especially access to newer technology. In a biotech company, "you don't have to bargain with the DNA sequencing facility to please, please, please sequence your oligos," Sato notes. In addition, industrial scientists don't rely on grants to fund their research. As a result, Sato notices that she has more time to perform research, since teaching, writing grant applications, and serving on committees no longer fill her schedule. "There actually is a much greater opportunity to stay immersed in your science than in an academic setting." (This isn't the case for every researcher who leaves academia for industry. See story in the sidebar.) RESOURCEFUL: Glaxo Wellcome's Allen Roses left Duke University in 1997 for the British drug company in part because the company had the equipment he needed to carry out his research into the genetic basis of Alzheimer's disease. Allen D. Roses, vice president and worldwide director of Glaxo Wellcome's international genetics program, left Duke University in 1997 for the British drug company, in part, because federal research dollars stagnated along with academic hiring in the '90s. "We were spending inordinate amounts of time writing grants that weren't being funded." Glaxo supported Roses' Duke-based research into the genetics of Alzheimer's disease, after his grants received poor ratings from the National Institutes of Health review committees. Industry simply has more resources than academic or government labs, Roses asserts. Smaller universities, such as Duke, have an especially difficult time keeping up with rapidly improving--and costly--computing power required to map and sequence genes. He felt mismatched against the country's few federally funded genome centers. "How can any individual lab compete with a genome center?" Roses notes that federal science cash tightened in the '90s, after years of growth in the number of Ph.D. scientists. The two conditions created a sometimes ruthless competition for dwindling slices of the research funding pie. That environment, he says, resulted in ethically questionable practices, including scientists delaying publication of rivals' papers so their own research could make it to print first. "There are people out there who border on being flagrantly dishonest," Roses claims. L. David Tomei, chief science officer of LXR Biotechnology Inc., increasingly felt that the process of successfully applying for grants was becoming less than forthright when he left Ohio State University in 1992 to cofound the Richmond, Calif.-based biotech company. In 1982, Tomei made observations about apoptosis--programmed cell death--that drove his research. Unfortunately, says Tomei, he had difficulty receiving peer-reviewed grants, because apoptosis was not officially recognized by the NIH as a research field until 1992 (R. Lewis, The Scientist, 9[3]:15, Feb. 6, 1995). That difficulty led to his departure from the university. Tomei suspects that the grant rejections piled up because he was too direct in his applications--writing what he wanted to find out through studies and what he wanted to explore in his research. The successful strategy, he says, is to present what you've already done and what you know--then explore the specific issues of your interest that remain unmentioned in the grant application (L.D. Tomei, The Journal of NIH Research, 3:39-40, August 1991). "This is a strategy that's tacitly accepted in academia," Tomei claims. "You really couldn't sit down and tell your peers what you want to do." In contrast, Tomei says, the venture capitalists who fueled his start-up require a more direct approach. He favors the immediate feedback of courting investors to the delayed, impersonal responses to grant applications. "I reached a point in my career where I felt I could express my creativity and it was wide open for criticism." Tomei also acknowledges drawing a higher salary as a scientific entrepreneur than as an academic investigator. But he claims that the satisfaction comes from doing science that is only limited by capital, which, he says, is only limited by the strength of the idea that capital is funding. He adds that, when he started the company, all he had was stock. "Stock is worthless when you set it up. You create that value." He admits that some biotech entrepreneurs create short-term value by hyping their advances, but he claims that the financial rewards are better long-term if a company actually delivers on its promises. Roses, too, dismisses money as a motivator behind his move, adding that his first-year salary with Glaxo Wellcome is less than what he could have made if he had stayed at Duke and collected his usual consulting fees. Still, both Roses and Tomei acknowledge that if their ideas turn into successful therapeutics, and their companies' stocks climb accordingly, their moves from academia to industry will prove lucrative.

The Call of Commerce: Former Academics Cite Advantages in Industry

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