You Heal Me To Death – by Jen B.

So, to delineate a few of the things I hate about Pfizer, one of the many scum-sucking, bottom-feeding corporations that have stealthily taken over America in the past twenty hundred years.

One. Upon hire, you have to sign an employment contract. In so doing, you are forced to agree that anything you create, be it during official working hours, or during your own free time becomes the property of Pfizer, Inc. For example, it you’re a biologist who happens to enjoy computer programming as a hobby, and at home on a weekend, working with your own personal computer, write a kick ass program that maybe predicts how a protein folds, a program that could make you a millionaire one hundred times over, well, Pfizer would own it, even though the company contributed nothing to its creation.

Two. The corporation’s unapologetic and transparent hypocrisy. Pfizer has this dumb outline of nine “core values” that is supposed to reflect the inner soul of the company, and adherence to these values is supposed to ensure Pfizerian success. Here’s a peek – Value No. 2, titled “Respect for People”. “We (Pfizer) recognize that people are the cornerstone of Pfizer’s success, we value our diversity as a source of strength, and we are proud of Pfizer’s history of treating people with respect and dignity.” Pfizer, in 2006, laid off thousands of scientists in an attempt to streamline the company and cut costs. Seemingly in direct violation of Value No. 2, a large percentage of these laid-off people were subsequently offered the “opportunity”to reapply for their own jobs, with decreased pay and diminished benefits.

Three. A few months before the 2004 presidential elections, human resources sent a mass email to every employee on Pfizer’s American campuses politely informing them that if George W. Bush did not win re-election, Big Pharma would most likely not get a ridiculously huge tax cut, and Pfizer would be forced to fire thousands of workers.

Four. Despite the GWB win, the company did fire at least 16,578 people, all while the Board of Directors hooked CEO Hank McKinnell up with a 72% pay increase (to $16.6 million in 2005) and a promised $80 million retirement package. Fuckers.

There are so many more. I worked at Pfizer for a year and a half. By the time I quit, I was completely disgusted. I researched cancer biology, and mainly studied the cellular signal transduction pathway that is initiated by activation of a protein receptor called Ras. When turned “on” by a signal external to the cell, Ras triggers a cascade of protein activity inside the cell that looks (very basically) like this: Ras activates Raf, Raf activates Mek, Mek activates MAP kinase, and MAP kinase activates a host of transcription factors that basically tell the cell to divide. Normally, activation of the Ras receptor is closely regulated, but mutations can cause it to become overactive. If left in the “on” position for too long, the cell divides abnormally, which can give rise to tumors. So, I was part of a group of biologists and chemists who worked to develop and test synthetic compounds that we hoped would function to inhibit the production of Mek in the cell. By halting production of this protein, we could inhibit activation of MAP kinase, and, theoretically, the cell would not receive the instruction to divide. Personally, I worked with a cell line that had been genetically engineered to express constitutive activity of the Ras receptor. I’d grow these cells into tissue, then experiment on them, dosing the tissue with varying concentrations of compound in solution. The solution, if permeable to the membrane, would diffuse into the cell, and a final screen quantified the amount of Mek present in the cells. We would select the compounds that best inhibited Mek production, and tweak the molecular structure to optimize efficacy.

The assays I ran were incredibly expensive. One “plate” cost about $500 to run. I managed to squeeze four compounds onto one plate, and of these four, one had to serve as a control, so really only three new compounds could be tested for this price. On average, I could run 20 plates in a week. $500*20 = $10000 a week. I did this for a year and a half, so calculating this into the equation brings total assay cost up to $780,000. And that’s just for the final screen – figure doesn’t include ancillary reagents and equipment, any of the chemical work, nor does it include salaries. I can’t even estimate what was actually spent. Out of all the compounds I tested, about thirty emerged as worthy of further investigation. Which, to me, renders this a shitty, expensive, and inefficient project that totally wasted a ton of money.

Still, if you take these numbers at face value, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that pharmaceutical companies spend magnificent amounts of money trying to cure disease. But, the volume of profits reaped by the industry on an annual basis render the millions spent researching actual disease chump change. At Pfizer, oncology is tossed a stingy budget – lab equipment and sometimes even reagents are literally handed down. In reality, the company pumps the lion’s share of earnings into marketing, first its drugs and then itself. Or, maybe it’s the other way around. As far as research is concerned, a heap of money is presently being spent to figure out how to alter the molecular compositions of already existing drugs, typically the blockbuster “lifestyle” drugs (statins, SSRI’s, ED compounds, allergy meds, etc.), tweaking them just enough to leave their efficacies unimpaired while rendering them technically different enough to be marketed under a new patent. Pfizer is doing this with Lipitor right now. Lipitor generated $10 billion in sales in 2004, a figure that is projected to grow to $14.2 billion in 2007, IF Pfizer can hang onto the patent. Discovery of drugs that actually save lives and cure disease will probably never get the kind of budget that these lifestyle drugs have, it’s just not in the best financial interest of the company. Consider cancer treatments – regardless of whether your drug works miracles or fails miserably, the customer ends up lost.

I study molecular biology and I love what I do. On a typical day, I might spend most of my waking hours thinking about molecules. If you see me eating, exercising, reading, drinking, whatever, there is a very good chance that I am thinking about molecules while I’m doing it. I have even dreamt about molecular biology at night. To a biologist genuinely interested in elucidating the molecular mechanism of disease, the sheer volume of time and money wasted by pharmaceutical companies is pretty depressing. But, hey, at least these companies are actively engaged in some of this research, and to be fair, biotech has made some astounding breakthroughs, even if, in the end, treatments carry enormous price tags. The question to me, is, what breakthroughs aren’t occurring due to wasted effort?

But, getting back to Pfizer. Some mornings I wake up and think, wow, I am so glad I don’t have to go to Pfizer today. At the start of my tenure, I had this really great boss who was both extremely intelligent and interesting. I liked and respected him very much. He loved science and mathematics – I had some great conversations with him. He loved studying cancer, and was genuinely motivated by a drive to understand and cure it. He was not interested in kissing anyone’s ass, and didn’t really have much aspiration towards being promoted into upper management (the position he held at this point was pretty much happenstance, as he was hired into Pfizer during it’s merge with Warner-Lambert). He fought (somewhat) relentlessly against the stupid decisions that executives who knew nothing about science would try to impose on us. So, it really wasn’t a huge surprise when he was eventually fired, under the auspice of “cutting costs”. So, about 12 months after I started working on the project, Pfizer executives fired my great boss and saddled me with a new one, a guy who was (and I’m sure still is) a real climb the corporate ladder type. Aiming to please at any cost, betrayal of self (does he even have a sense of self?) was no problem for him. And he was dumb. DUMB. Do not be fooled by people who masquerade as intelligent behind advanced graduate degrees. I didn’t even pretend to like him, and he’d still try to make bullshit conversation with me everyday. Here’s an excerpt: “Jen, my neighbor’s son just got accepted to Berkeley. Do you think there is a possibility that he might turn gay if he goes? I know another person whose son went to Berkeley and he’s gay.” (My response) “No, I don’t think that a school can turn someone gay. Do you think you might be gay?” May it suffice to say, he grew to hate me back.

In an attempt to please a bunch of executives in an office, he basically barged into my lab and attempted to change the very rational design of my assay so that the “numbers would be better”. Not correct, not reflective of how the drugs were interacting with the cells, but better. So, I calmly explained to him the rationale behind the design of the experiment, informed him that I had spent a year optimizing it, told him how I’d gone about doing this, and pretty pleasantly admitted that all that I’d done probably did not preclude the possibility that things could be made better. So, I spent another month tweaking with it, but no great improvements were evident, so it seemed that what we had was as good as it was going to get. Then, he flatly asked me to do the assay in a way that would be, for lack of a better term, wrong. Completely contrary to scientific methodology, fraudulent, and totally fucking wrong. So I said no, which, likely a reflection of his own lame life philosophy, totally frustrated him. I suppose that, in his mind, because he was the “boss” and I the “employee”, I was supposed to blindly do whatever it was he asked, just take orders and push papers. But, I wasn’t going to do it, and frankly really didn’t care if I got fired over it, because the job was starting to beat me down. Anyway, he didn’t actually have the authority to fire me, and if he tried to complain, he risked that I would expose him as a fraud, so he instead chose to passively fight with me for the next two months. Here’s what happened on a weekly basis: I would fight with him while I continued to do the assay correctly. Ultimately I would go over the data with him, and we would decide if it was “reportable” (based on criteria long ago laid out by the group). If it was reportable, I would transmit the data to a database available to Pfizer scientists globally. He seemed OK with this at first, but within a month told me that he would like to maintain responsibility for officially sending the data, which honestly struck me as being sort of strange, since his usual approach was to weasel out of doing really any work at all. But, glad to have one less thing to do, I agreed. Still a little suspicious, I checked out some of the numbers in the database a couple of weeks later, and they didn’t match my originally reported data. When I very pointedly confronted him about it, he totally and lamely denied it. (Honestly, there’s really nothing worse than a person who can’t even stand up for his own actions.)

I ended up quitting. While I was offered the opportunity to move in with another group, with the accompanying promise that I would not have to have anything to do with this guy at all, I still decided to leave, I just wasn’t into it anymore. And, in spite of my provable accusation, he was left in charge of that little project. I understand that, over the past year, all the “success” he has brought to the project has earned him awards, accolades, and I imagine, more money. His reign of terror may be coming to a close, though. I went to a party a couple of weeks ago in La Jolla, with an old friend from Pfizer, he’s still in their employ. It seems that the two “best” compounds from the project were moved to a mouse model recently, and it is becoming evident that, contrary to the in vitro predictions, the compounds are functioning to increase, not shrink the tumors in the mice.

Provided that falsified data is limited to discovery, and doesn’t extend to clinical trials, it really doesn’t hurt anyone, rather, anything but the company. Yet, accusations of fudged and omitted data are replete in lawsuits filed in defense of people who’ve taken and been harmed by Celebrex, Zoloft, Viagra, and Accutane (just to name a few). So, I wonder if the company hasn’t generated a climate in which it’s become acceptable to bend the rules of science to get data to fit a desired outcome. I’m only now reminded of something that happened about six months before I left Pfizer. I sat in a room, at a meeting with my group, we were being entertained by a salesman from some French diagnostics company, a company that, basically, screens synthetic compounds to generate toxicity information. He handed out a sheet of paper that delineated the cost of the procedure, and stacked his offerings up against competing companies and their prices. I noticed that, for about twice the cost, his company answered about 35% less questions than another. So, seemed weird to me, and I asked him about it. The answer he gave me was pretty direct – the fewer questions you ask, the fewer answers you have to give the FDA. Remember, these were questions directly related to the potential toxicity of the compound in the human system. I don’t think a single other person in the room was even remotely surprised by his answer, and, frankly, I kind of felt like a dumbass for having asked it – it exposed my lack of experience in industry.

I really believe that most, well, at least many, scientists at Pfizer understand or suspect that their jobs may be a farce. Still, they stay, and it is not hard to figure out why. Pfizer pays, even on average, better than other biotech companies, and pays far better than most government and academic jobs. This is very apparent at the entry level, lab tech positions, but probably most apparent at the other end of the spectrum, at the PhD level. And, as far as Pfizer committing to creating a culture of deception and bad science, well, I think that’s done mostly to stimulate profits as well. Better numbers = more investment dollars and more marketable drugs. Pfizer executives can assuage guilty consciences (and here I am generously assuming they have them) by reverting to the old stand-by that corporations have, primarily, a responsibility to generate as large a return as possible on stockholder investment. And the people who work for the company, I suppose, buy bigger houses filled with fancier things, nicer SUVs, and better educations for their kids. All this, I think, is fairly reflective of the status quo in America today.

Shortly before I quit, I met a woman who had only recently been hired to work at Pfizer. She and I were the first to arrive for some meeting, so we were sitting in a room together, alone, and it seemed sort of rude not to strike up some conversation. Generally speaking, I hate small talk, and am only slightly less than completely adverse to making it, but, I set my feelings aside for a couple of minutes. So, in our conversation, I realized that she had given up a job at another local biotech company at which she had maintained full-time employee status (with benefits, vacations, sick days, etc.) to take this job at Pfizer as a temporary contract hire (absolutely no benefits). To me, this seemed to be a strange move, so I asked why she did it. No joke, she looked directly at me and said, “Well, everyone ends up working at Pfizer eventually.” I was immediately reduced to a character in a George Orwell novel. It felt creepy. Am very glad to not work there anymore.

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