steel. And China is feeding its appetites
for those commodities—and increasingly for oil—by investing in resource
extraction in less-developed areas like Africa. Even in a government not prone
to harsh self-evaluation, a top Chinese environmental official pronounced
ominously last year that the pollution crisis at home “allows for no optimism.”
The statistics are staggering.
Fourteen thousand new cars hit the road each day, and by the year 2020, China
is expected to have 130 million cars. Meanwhile, about 70 percent of China’s
nontransportation energy comes from burning 3.2 billion tons of coal each year.
The nation is building coal-fired power plants—one of the dirtiest forms of
energy production—at a clip of two to three a week. China is also home to 5 of
the 10 most polluted cities on the planet, according to China’s own State
Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA)—including the major coal-mining
city of Linfen, the most polluted city in the world. The World Bank estimated
in early 2007 that air pollution alone causes at least 700,000 premature deaths
in China annually.
The impact of all this extends far
beyond China’s borders. Taken as a group, its coal-fired power plants emit the
world’s highest levels of sulfur dioxide (a major element of acid rain) and
mercury, both of which rise high into the atmosphere and hitch a ride on air
currents circling the globe. One study, published last year in the Journal of
Geophysical Research, calculated that three-quarters of the black carbon
pollution in the atmosphere over the western United States originates in Asia.
It is estimated that as much as 35 percent of all the mercury pollution in the
western United States comes from abroad, and China is most likely the main
culprit. According to the World Wildlife Fund, untreated waste has turned China’s
Yangtze River basin into the single largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean.
“There’s no doubt,” says Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia Studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations, “that what China is doing on the domestic front
has an enormous effect on the globe.”
Within China, the devastation is more
intense. One-third of its land has been hit by acid rain, according to the head
of SEPA. One hundred ten of its cities are short of water. Available water is
so polluted that nearly 700 million Chinese citizens drink from supplies
contaminated by human and animal excrement.
The conventional wisdom has long held
that China is merely following the path of the United States and other
developed countries that polluted—and in some cases, continue to do so—on their
way to a wealthier populace and eventual stricter environmental controls. But
the epic pace of China’s development could spawn an ecological catastrophe of a
different order. “What China is facing in terms of environmental challenges,”
Economy says, “is not comparable to anything we have faced in this country.”
Ironically, the environmental goals
set by the Chinese government appear more progressive than those of the United
States. In its latest five-year plan, issued in 2005, the central government
targeted a 20 percent improvement in energy productivity by 2010. The previous
year, it pledged that 10 percent of the nation’s energy would come from
renewables by 2010. This year, it began requiring that new cars meet fuel
economy standards higher than those in the United States.
The problem comes in enforcement.
Local officials, charged with meeting aggressive economic targets for their
region’s industry, tend to ignore national environmental regulations, covering
up spills and building new power plants behind the backs of central government
regulators. Efforts to meet the 20 percent energy-–productivity pledge, for example, are
already well behind schedule.
In late October, China’s environmental
protection agency announced a new policy regarding pollution by export
manufacturers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Any company
found in violation would be forced to close for one to three years.
“I think that the leadership is at a
very important tipping-point moment,” says Orville Schell, director of the
Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “With the Olympics coming
up, a new catalytic element has arisen. They will be getting the mass scrutiny
of the world at a time when they want to show their advantage.”
Although it’s easy to view China as
some sort of ecological evil empire, its fate is entwined with the U.S.
appetite for consumption and growth. The United States still holds the title as
the world’s biggest consumer of world resources and largest emitter of all greenhouse
gases. Our per capita emissions dwarf those of China, or any other nation for
that matter. An estimated 7 percent of China’s carbon-dioxide emissions derive
from U.S. consumption of goods made in China. “People are becoming much more
aware that a lot of the pollution reaching the United States arises from
manufacturing the goods we buy,” says Barbara Finamore, head of the Natural
Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) China Clean Energy Program. “I think just
like with toy safety, we are going to see a lot more demand that the goods are
not just safe in and of themselves to use but also come from factories that are
complying with China’s environmental laws.”
Some nongovernmental organizations in
China have been pushing for reform over the last decade. Members of these
grassroots outfits, often operating at the risk of arrest or harassment, press
for environmental improvements through public demonstrations and the limited
legal action allowed. “On the positive side, you have demonstrations, you have
marches, you have hundreds of thousands of people writing letters to complain
about pollution and request that something get done about it,” says Economy.
“On the other hand, you also have citizen activism such that when Beijing said
we are going to shut down the factories in advance of the Olympics, factory
managers are coming back and saying no.”
Louis J Sheehan The good news is that
overhauling outdated technology might easily rein in the devastating pollution.
Much of China’s industry uses energy-guzzling equipment from the 1970s, and the
NRDC estimates that by using existing technology and enforcing simple building
codes, the country could cut its energy demands by half or more in the next
decade.
“There is no other country in the
world as dynamic and rapidly changing as China,” observes Alex Wang, an NRDC
attorney who directs the council’s China Environmental Law Project in Beijing.
“It really is a country where things can be dramatically different from one day
to the next.”
Just as quickly as China became the
world’s leading polluter, it could find a greener path to development. But if
it fails, the outcome will be more than just a public relations nightmare.
xxxx
Olmert: Israel risks South Africa-like
struggle
By Josef Federman, The Associated
Press
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert warned in a published interview Thursday that "the state of
Israel is finished" if a Palestinian state is not created. He said the
alternative is a South African-style apartheid struggle.
The explosive reference to apartheid
came as Olmert returned from a high-profile peace conference in the USA, hoping
to prepare a skeptical nation for difficult negotiations with the Palestinians.
WHAT'S NEXT?: Navigating path to peace
will still be tricky
Though Olmert has long said that the
region's demography works against Israel, the comments published in the Haaretz
daily newspaper were among his strongest. Israeli officials have long rejected
any comparison to the racist system once in place in South Africa.
Olmert and Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas agreed this week at a summit in Annapolis, Md., to resume peace
talks after a seven-year freeze.
The two leaders pledged to try to
reach an agreement on the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of next
year.
In the interview, Olmert said it is a
vital Israeli interest to create a Palestinian state because of the growing
Arab population in the area.
"The day will come when the
two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for
equal voting rights," Olmert told Haaretz. "As soon as that happens,
the state of Israel is finished."
The interview was published on the
60th anniversary of the historic United Nations decision to partition
Palestine, setting up separate Jewish and Arab states. The vote led to a war,
and the Palestinian state was not created.
The Palestinians want to form their
state in Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem — areas Israel captured in the
Mideast war in 1967.
Jews are a solid majority inside
Israel — roughly 76% of the population of 6.4 million. However, if the West
Bank and Gaza are included, Arabs make up about half the population.
To ensure Israel can maintain its
character as a democracy with a solid Jewish majority, Olmert supports a
withdrawal from much of the West Bank and parts of East Jerusalem, following
Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005.
Israel's Arab citizens have the right
to vote, but about 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not
have Israeli citizenship or rights.
Olmert, a hard-liner earlier in his
career, has repeatedly warned in recent years that Israel cannot remain both
Jewish and democratic if it holds on to the West Bank and Gaza. He has never
used the South African analogy in public.
The Israeli leader received an
important boost Thursday when police recommended that prosecutors drop an
investigation into whether Olmert illegally intervened in the government's sale
of a bank two years ago. The threat of indictment in the case cast a cloud over
Olmert for months, but police decided there was insufficient evidence.
The decision, coming after months of
investigations, including two interrogations of Olmert himself, was forwarded
to the attorney general, who makes the final decision on whether to indict.
That decision is weeks or months away, but an indictment is unlikely.
Police are still conducting two other
corruption investigations against Olmert, who has denied any wrongdoing.
Two polls published in Israeli
newspapers Thursday showed the Israeli public to be highly skeptical of the
fledgling peace process.
The polls, conducted by the Dahaf
Institute and Dialog agency, found that fewer than one in five Israelis say
they believe the Annapolis conference was a success, and more than 80% of the
public says the Israeli and Palestinian leaders will not meet their goal of
reaching a deal in 2008.
Louis J Sheehan
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
The
polls each questioned about 500 people and had margins of error of +/—4.5
percentage points.
The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly.
A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be
swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt
cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph,
scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t tell me that
isn’t a comet,” he says.
In
Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked
across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New
Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after.
Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed
into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life
on the planet. What’s more, he thinks that clues about the catastrophe are
hiding in plain sight, embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups
around the world. His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many
different mythologies and raises questions about how frequently major asteroid impacts occur. What
scientists know about such collisions is based mainly on a limited survey of
craters around the world and on the moon. Only 185 craters on Earth have been
identified, and almost all are on dry land, leaving largely unexamined the 70
percent of the planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land, many of
the craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that
Earth has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have
suspected.
Masse’s epiphany came while poring over
Hawaiian oral histories regarding the goddess Pele and wondering what they
might reveal about the lava flows that episodically destroy human settlements
and create new tracts of land. He reasoned that even though the stories are
often clouded by exaggerations and mystical explanations, many may refer to
actual incidents. He tested his hypothesis by cross-checking carbon-14 ages for
the lava flows against dates included in royal Hawaiian genealogies. The
result: Several flows matched up with the specific reigns associated with them
in the oral histories. Other myths, Masse theorizes, hold similar clues.
Masse’s
biggest idea is that some 5,000 years ago, a 3-mile-wide ball of rock and ice
swung around the sun and smashed into the ocean off the coast of Madagascar.
The ensuing cataclysm sent a series of 600-foot-high tsunamis crashing against
the world’s coastlines and injected plumes of superheated water vapor and
aerosol particulates into the atmosphere. Within hours, the infusion of heat
and moisture blasted its way into jet streams and spawned superhurricanes that
pummeled the other side of the planet. For about a week, material ejected into
the atmosphere plunged the world into darkness. All told, up to 80 percent of
the world’s population may have perished, making it the single most lethal
event in history.
0000
The
Web has helped home buyers find places to live for years, through real-estate
agencies' sites and classified listings. But now a number of sites have emerged
that provide a raft of information beyond price, location and photos.
Among
other things, these sites allow house hunters to screen prospective neighbors,
evaluate school districts and see how members of the community rate a street's
Internet connectivity and cellphone service. Shoppers can keep abreast of the
news in a neighborhood they're considering, and get alerts when houses list for
sale or restaurants open -- or when a registered sex offender moves to the
area. Consumers can find energy-efficient homes and compare locations by levels
of toxic waste or drought conditions. And both buyers and sellers can join
discussions with others who are in the market and real-estate professionals.
All
of this information can be particularly helpful in turbulent real-estate
markets like today's, when many people would welcome greater assurance that
they're making the right decision.
Here's
a survey of what's out there.
"You
can see just about any type of information about a house on Trulia.com,"
says Matthew Orr, a Long Beach, N.Y., resident who used the site to find the
home he and his fiancée are due to close on this month.
For
starters, users can enter a city, town or ZIP Code and see a listing of every
home for sale, sortable by price, address, number of bedrooms or bathrooms,
broker or type of home (single-family or multi-family). They can also narrow
the search by establishing parameters for location, size and property type. Mr.
Orr says he and his fiancée used Trulia.com, which is owned by San
Francisco-based Trulia Inc., to zero in on houses with big yards for their
dogs, and he recommends the site's home-comparison features.
Clicking
on a listing brings up a page with a more-detailed description of the home,
including how long it has been on the market, and photos. This page also offers
lists of similar homes for sale and similar recently sold homes, with links to
pages for each of those homes; charts comparing the home's price to those of
the similar homes and to the average listing and sale prices in the area; a sales
history for the home, drawn from public records; and a link to a real-estate
guide for the area that includes information on market trends, schools, crime
statistics, income levels and commuting times.
There
are also discussion boards, and users can arrange to have email alerts sent to
them when properties within their search parameters are listed or sold. The
site can also send alerts when the price of a particular house changes or the
house is sold.
Similar
features are available on the site owned by Seattle-based Zillow.com5. Boulder, Colo., resident Melanie
Fredericks says that when she and her husband were considering selling their
house and buying a new home closer to their jobs, they used Zillow.com to
"gather all the information before even heading to a real-estate agent,
and decided to wait for a better time to sell." One feature she found
helpful was what the site calls Zestimates, which are Zillow.com's estimates of
the value of homes, including homes that aren't listed for sale.
Another
interesting feature of Zillow.com is that people whose homes aren't on the
market but who would consider selling at the right price can post a "Make
Me Move" price to see if there's any interest worth exploring.
Users
of these and other real-estate sites should keep in mind that the data the
sites use can sometimes be dated. For instance, information on the number of
bedrooms and bathrooms may not reflect recent renovations. And the census
figures the sites use for demographic profiles may be years old, so they may
not reflect recent trends in rapidly changing neighborhoods or towns.
One
way to supplement the statistical information on real-estate sites and to get
help with particular questions or concerns is to seek input from others in the
market and from real-estate professionals on the sites' discussion boards. Both
Trulia and Zillow say these are their most popular features.
Lisa
Suarez, an insurance broker from San Leandro, Calif., turned to a discussion
board on Trulia.com recently after months of failing to find a buyer for her
home.
Ms.
Suarez posted a message on Trulia Voices at 2 a.m. asking if anyone had any
suggestions on how to speed up the process of selling her home. Within minutes,
she says, she was contacted by a real-estate agent who offered some advice that
Ms. Suarez liked, and the two agreed to meet. Ms. Suarez hired the agent, Cindi
Hagley of Windermere Real Estate Services Co. in San Ramon, Calif., and within
three weeks had two offers for her house that she is considering. "In this
devastating market, it means everything that you can reach someone out there
that's listening," she says.
Other
sites are designed to give users a look at neighborhoods through the eyes of
the people who live there. On recently launched StreetAdvisor.com6, based in Melbourne,
Australia, buyers can look for input from residents of a particular street
about their neighbors, local services and more.
For
instance, potential buyers looking at a home on North Carlyn Ave. in Campbell,
Calif., can read a review of life on the street written by Tom Huggett, who has
lived there for 21 years. He notes that the first houses were built before
World War II, and readers can practically feel the shade of the mature
sycamores, redwoods, oaks and fruit trees he describes. The people range from
infants to seniors, he says, and are "friendly but not nosey and helpful
but not pushy." And he notes that it's only about three blocks to a
"newly vibrant downtown" with a lot of bars, restaurants and shops.
Reviewers
also rate their street for its overall "vibe," which includes
neighborly spirit and night life, among other factors; for its Internet and
pay-TV access and cellphone reception; for its "health," which
includes factors like cleanliness, noise levels and traffic; for the cost of
living and real-estate values; and for services and amenities like public
transportation, medical facilities, schools, child care, and parks and
recreation. Users can post pictures and videos as well.
One
drawback of the site is that it hasn't had the time to build up much content.
Mr. Huggett is the only contributor from his street, for instance, and users
will find no comments for many streets.
For
a different take on neighborhood life, house hunters can check San Diego-based RottenNeighbor.com7. This site lets users
post complaints about their neighbors, so it can serve as a warning about
frictions in a neighborhood. One recent user in Chicago wrote that the
"guy on the top floor of this building plays his stereo all day and night.
It's so loud....He's why I'm moving."
Again,
while such sites can be useful, there is a caveat. There is no way for sites
that depend on user-generated content to verify the vast majority of
information that people post, and of course such comments are largely, and
often entirely, subjective.
Several
sites cater to house hunters' concerns about energy efficiency and the
environment. Walkscore.com8, started by
Seattle-based Front Seat Management LLC in July, rates the walkability of a
neighborhood by the proximity of stores, restaurants, schools, parks, libraries
and more to an address the user submits.
In
the wake of a recent rash of brush fires, water shortages and other drought
conditions around the country, Sperling's Best Places of Portland, Ore.,
launched DroughtScore.com9 last month. By entering
a ZIP Code, town or city, users can see a graph showing the past 13 months of
drought levels in an area, based on statistics from the National Climatic Data
Center.
For
a broad view of the environmental conditions in a neighborhood, the best
resource is the Environmental Protection Agency. At EPA.gov10, house hunters can
click on the "Where You Live" tab to learn about levels of air and
water pollution, hazardous-waste sites and releases of toxic chemicals in a
given city, county or ZIP Code.
At
EnergyStar.gov11, a joint site of the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, users can find
builders working with the EPA to build homes that meet the government's Energy
Star standards for energy efficiency. Another site, EcoBroker.com12, owned by EcoBroker
International, Evergreen, Colo., can also help users find homes with
energy-efficient and environmentally friendly features.
Other
sites specialize in information on school systems and crime statistics, areas
that some real-estate agents aren't inclined to talk about because of concerns
that their comments could be construed as steering people away from or toward
certain neighborhoods.
"I'm
very careful as to what I tell buyers when they ask those questions," says
Toni L. Medjuck, owner of Beach to Bay Realty in Seminole, Fla. "I'd
rather refer them to where they can find the information."
For
Sergey Krasnovsky and his wife, planning a move to Seattle meant using GreatSchools.net13 to narrow their search
to two school districts for their 8-year-old son. Only then did they look for a
potential home to buy. "The site lets you analyze each school not only
based on [statistical ratings] but also on real feedback from parents,"
Mr. Krasnovsky notes.
The
site gives information for both public and private schools, including test
scores, the ethnicity of students, student-teacher ratios and spending per
pupil. In addition to written reviews, parents rate schools for principal
leadership, teacher quality, extracurricular activities, parent involvement,
and safety and discipline. The site is owned by GreatSchools Inc., a nonprofit
organization based in San Francisco. Another site, SchoolMatters.com14, a service of the
Standard & Poor's division of McGraw-Hill
Cos., provides information on public schools only.
For
crime statistics, Las Vegas-based AreaConnect LLC lets users compare data for
more than 8,000 cities at www.AreaConnect.com/crime15. Family Watchdog LLC,
based in Indianapolis, provides the addresses and pictures of registered sex
offenders at FamilyWatchdog.us16. The site also will
send email and cellphone alerts if a registered offender moves into a given
neighborhood.
For
a much broader scope, YourStreet.com17, owned by San
Francisco-based YourStreet Inc., lets users find recent news reports and
commentary from blogs for any location in the U.S. The material includes crime
reporting but also covers the full spectrum of community news. Users can also
initiate or join discussions about local events. "We look at news as the
foundation of what is really going on in a local community," says James
Nicholson, YourStreet's CEO and founder.
0000
Jim Hammond is an elite athlete. He works out
two hours a day with a trainer, pushing himself through sprints, runs, and
strength-building exercises. His resting heart rate is below 50. He’s won three
gold medals and one silver in amateur competitions this year alone, running
races from 100 to 800 meters. In his division, he’s broken four national racing
records. But perhaps the most elite thing about Hammond is his age.
He is 93. And really, there’s nothing much
wrong with him, aside from the fact that he doesn’t see very well. He takes no
drugs and has no complaints, although his hair long ago turned white and his
skin is no longer taut.
His
secret? He doesn’t have one. Hammond never took exceptional measures during his
long life to preserve his health. He did not exercise regularly until his
fifties and didn’t get serious about it until his eighties, when he began
training for the Georgia Golden Olympics. “I love nothing better than winning,”
he says. “It’s been a wonderful thing for me.” Hammond is aging, certainly, but
somehow he isn’t getting old—at least, not in the way we usually think about
it.
They say aging is one of the only certain
things in life. But it turns out they were wrong. In recent years,
gerontologists have overturned much of the conventional wisdom about getting
old. Aging is not the simple result of the passage of time. According to a
provocative new view, it is actually something our own bodies create, a side
effect of the essential inflammatory system that protects us against infectious
disease. As we fight off invaders, we inflict massive collateral damage on
ourselves, poisoning our own organs and breaking down our own tissues. We are
our own worst enemy.
This paradox is transforming the way we
understand aging. It is also changing our understanding of what diseases are
and where they come from. Inflammation seems to underlie not just senescence
but all the chronic illnesses that often come along with it: diabetes,
atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, heart attack. “Inflammatory factors predict
virtually all bad outcomes in humans,” says Russell Tracy, a professor of
pathology and biochemistry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine,
whose pioneering research helped demonstrate the
role of inflammation in heart disease. “It predicts having heart attacks,
having heart failure, becoming diabetic; predicts becoming fragile in old age;
predicts cognitive function decline, even cancer to a certain extent.”
The idea that chronic diseases might be caused
by persistent inflammation has been kicking around since the 19th century. Only
in the past few years, though, have modern biochemistry and the emerging field
of systems biology made it possible to grasp the convoluted chemical
interactions involved in bodywide responses like inflammation. Over a lifetime,
this essential set of defensive mechanisms runs out of bounds and gradually damages
organs throughout the body.
When you start to think about aging as a
consequence of inflammation, as Tracy and many prominent gerontologists now do,
you start to see old age in a different, much more hopeful light. If
decrepitude is driven by an overactive immune system, then it is treatable. And
if many chronic diseases share this underlying cause, they might all be
remedied in a similar way. The right anti-inflammatory drug could be a panacea,
treating diabetes, dementia, heart disease, and even cancer. Such a wonder drug
might allow us to live longer, but more to the point, it would almost surely
allow us to live better, increasing the odds that we could all spend our old
age feeling like Jim Hammond: healthy, vibrant, and vital. And unlike science
fiction visions of an immortality pill, a successful anti-inflammatory
treatment could actually happen within our lifetime.
For the last century and a half, the average
life span in wealthy countries has increased steadily, climbing from about 45
to more than 80 years. There is no good reason to think this increase will
suddenly stop. But longer life today often simply means taking longer to
die—slowly, expensively, and with more disease and disability. “If you talk to
many old people, what they are really desperate about is not the fact that
they’re going to die but that they are going to be sick, dependent, have to
rely on others,” says Luigi Ferrucci, chief of the longitudinal studies section
at the National Institute on Aging and director of the Baltimore Longitudinal
Study of Aging, the nation’s longest-running study of old age.
Biologists have known for a while that
inflammation increases with age, but until recently, given everything else that
slumps, spikes, or goes off the rails as we get old, it didn’t seem especially
important. Some researchers on aging still think that way.
But a big clue linking inflammation with aging
came in the late 1990s, when Tracy and his colleagues showed that C-reactive
protein (CRP), an inflammatory protein, is an amazingly accurate predictor of a future heart attack—as
good as or better than high blood pressure or high cholesterol. At least in
heart disease, inflammation isn’t just a bystander. What’s more, we could do
something to decrease it. Aspirin, which was already known to help people with
heart disease, seems to work primarily by reducing inflammation.
So
why should our own immune system rely on such an apparently dangerous
mechanism? The answer lies in the fact that infectious disease has historically
been the number one killer of human beings, and responding to this threat has
profoundly shaped our biology. Possessing a fierce and ferocious immune
response primed to keep us alive long enough to reproduce was an evolutionary
no-brainer.
.
PARADIGM LOST
As Drug
Industry Struggles,
Chemists Face Layoff Wave
Lipitor
Pioneer Is Out
At Doomed
Pfizer Lab;
A
Blockbuster Drought
By AVERY JOHNSON
December 11, 2007; Page A1
ANN
ARBOR, Michigan -- In January, Pfizer
Inc. announced it was closing its storied research laboratories here, laying
off 2,100 people. Among the casualties: Bob Sliskovic, a 23-year lab veteran
who helped create the world's most successful drug.
The
closure and Dr. Sliskovic's abrupt change of circumstances are emblematic of
the pharmaceutical industry's declining fortunes. It was at the Ann Arbor
facility in the late 1980s that Dr. Sliskovic first assembled the chemicals
that make up Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering drug that has generated about
$80 billion in sales since its launch and ranks as the bestselling
pharmaceutical product ever. Today, Lipitor is nearing the end of its patent
life, and Pfizer hasn't been able to come up with enough promising new drugs to
replace it.
Following
that initial breakthrough some 20 years ago, Dr. Sliskovic worked on several
other research projects, but none panned out. His losing streak mirrors the
industry's. A byproduct of the late-19th-century chemical business,
pharmaceutical research thrived for more than a century by finding chemical
combinations to treat diseases. But after contributing substantially both to
human health and drug-industry profits, it has failed to produce significant
innovations in recent years.
High
failure rates have long plagued chemistry-based drug research. Between 5,000
and 10,000 compounds are tested for every drug that makes it to market. In
recent years, the problem seems to have gotten worse. Despite spending tens of
billions of dollars more on research and development, pharmaceutical companies
have fewer and fewer drugs to show for it. In 2006, the industry received Food
and Drug Administration approval for just 18 new chemical-based drugs, down
from 53 in 1996. Moreover, many of those drugs are variations of existing
medicines.
Robert
Massie, president of the American Chemical Society's database of chemistry
research, says some researchers are questioning how many more chemical
combinations there are that are useful against diseases. "It's like how
coming out with metal drivers in golf was a huge innovation, but now it's incremental.
You're just coming out with drivers that are a little longer or rounder,"
he says.
As
pills like Lipitor made out of elements from the periodic table prove harder to
come by, pharmaceutical research is being superseded by the newer field of biotechnology.
The latter relies mostly on biologists who make proteins from live cells.
The
shift is exacting a human toll, as big drug companies like Pfizer lay off
thousands of chemists, casting a pall over what was once a secure, well-paying
profession. "When I started in this industry in the 1980s, you didn't
worry about things like this," Dr. Sliskovic says of the lab closure.
It
isn't clear how many chemists have lost pharmaceutical-company jobs. But
overall, 116,000 chemists were employed in 2006, down from 140,000 in 2003,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. During the same period, employment
of biologists rose to 116,000 from 112,000. Just as the rise of biotechnology
is contributing to an economic boom in Northern California, the decline of chemical-based
research is hurting the Michigan cities of Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo, along with
some regions of New Jersey and Illinois.
Dr.
Sliskovic, a 50-year-old with a mustache and the scattered air of a scientist,
was raised in Doncaster, a coal-mining town in northern England. His father, a
refugee from the former Yugoslavia, found work there after World War II. As a
child, Dr. Sliskovic says he was fascinated by such things as the properties
that "make a mint minty."
That
interest led him to pursue a doctorate in chemistry. In 1982, his Ph.D. adviser
told him of a friend who worked as a consultant for a pharmaceutical company in
New York. The company was looking for chemists to do postdoctoral research.
Raised with a passion for American comic books, Dr. Sliskovic says he jumped at
the opportunity to come to the U.S.
Two
years later, his research completed, he received a job offer from
Warner-Lambert Co.'s Ann Arbor labs. "Holy cow! I accept," he
remembers saying.
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