Surfing around, checking out latest movie trailers on Apple’s website, hopping over to Blogger.com to read up on some of the more recent blogs, then came across this little rant. Apparently, 15-year old Lauren didn’t have the best spring break. Click on the images to move through the story. Two things I noticed: for a 15-year old, she is taking awesome pictures… a photographer with a great eye for details, and a writer with some humor.

A chemical industry lineage, weak biotech links, and neglect of the U.S. market have led to the German pharmaceutical industry’s slide, according to an article published by Reuters corresponent Shankar.

“The seeds of this decline were sown long ago,” says former Novartis pharmaceutical head Jerry Karabelas. “Hoechst and Bayer pharma were the stepchildren of chemicals companies and lacked the understanding of molecular biology that produced drugs in the 1980s and 1990s,” he said. Analysts say the drug makers often treated their pharmaceutical operations as secondary businesses to which they banished executives. They also looked at Europe as a major driver for growth and understood the U.S. market poorly. “Competition is a great breeder of innovation and if you’re insular the danger is that you tend to assume the competition is the company next to you,” says Karabelas. The lack of big drugs could also be put down to the fact that German drug makers have not been able to draw on university research as well as their U.S. counterparts. “Germany did not have a big biotech industry, and the cross-fertilisation between universities and companies was lacking,” says Merrill Lynch analyst Andreas Schmidt. The shortage of foreign talent at the top of German companies has not helped, either. “Language is certainly an issue - you can’t be inclusive to global talent unless you embrace English,” says Karabelas.

Note added August 2005: Article is not available anymore online.

Here’s an all too familiar statistic, pulled from the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention. Why post it here? I just found it amazing how rapidly the percentages have gone up between 1995 to 2001, the year this data was published (for an enlarged view, click on thumbnails). Enjoy your next burger…

The lion’s share of the Nobel science prizes went to Americans this week - as usual. Deborah Zabarenko explored in her October 9 article the link between increased funding for basic science (relative to other countries) and the number of awards doled out to scientists at US institutions. I might also point out another correlation: Larger research budgets across the US pharmaceutical industry also lead to a higher number of innovative new medicines, again relative to other countries. Read article..

While hunting around for new design ideas to feed to my design clients, I came across this flash-based site, Unrealideas.com. Awesome.

And great design is happening all around the world, for example at Design Made In Germany, a portal for German artists.

A hilarious two-minute film staged on I-405. Can’t tell you more, check it out for yourself. If you haven’t already seen it, you’ll come to thank me. View 405-The Movie now (no registration required)

I know that many of you regularly follow Derek Lowe’s column In the Pipeline, writings about medicinal chemistry and drug discovery in general. But did you know that his column was recently included in a Forbes Magazine survey about “The Best Medical Blogs”. I would consider this a top honor, so congrats Derek! Go to Forbes article..

I’ve written countless times about the annoyance of spam - or unsolicited bulk email. My friend Wil Gee pointed me to an excellent article in the New York Times magazine. It’s quite a read, and you should take the time to read it.