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Megan McArdle at The Atlantic tackles pharmaceutical research and asks why developing new drugs are so difficult. Her answer is the obvious one: because it's really difficult. McArdle launches her discussion of this extremely fraught and big-buck question with former National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni who championed "translational research" -- that is getting academics more involved in developing new drugs and less active in pursuing basic research. Zerhouni then went to Sanofi to run R&D and test his ideas and discovered it wasn't quite as simple as all that. No one -- not Big Pharma, not the academically tilting biotechs, not academic researchers -- were all that successful in developing new products. Why he needed to go to a company to discover that is a question McArdle does not ask.
McArdle's discussion skips merrily across the sociology of science in the U.S. She makes the assumption, which she eventually abandons, that a "failure" of R&D must be attributable to some structural breakdown in how R&D is pursued. This borrows from traditional rivalries and status fights between chemists and biologists, between corporate investigators and academics, and, with the coming of the genetic revolution, between molecular biologists and their colleagues in biotechs and academia (funded extensively by the federal government and the stock market) and organic chemists at Big Pharma (supported by massive cash flows of blockbuster products). The sociology of all this is fascinating and easy to oversimplify. In the early days of biotech, the clash between "research" and "technology," roughly between molecular biology and chemistry, or biotech and Big Pharma, was at its most intense. The biology crowd believed they were well on their way to fully elucidating cellular processes, making drug discovery, in their eyes, straightforward (the '80s were full of such euphoria -- and Zerhouni's initial optimism may well have tapped some of that). Intellectually, they looked down upon Big Pharma, which was still doing vast amounts of traditional mass screening, a classically bureaucratic kind of science that reflected corporate needs and structures. Big Pharma companies wielded huge financial and organizational advantages and were generally fat and happy, if a little nervous: They had marketing power, clinical testing units, regulatory experts, lobbyists, all fed by those cash flows. 
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