Profits of Science: The American Marriage of Business and Technology

Abstract

This is superb book; it can be recommended without reservation. After reading it, this reviewer imagined someone had plunged stick in his skull and stirred vigorously. Robert Teitelman is senior editor of Institutional Investor , here primarly writing about drug industry from viewpoint of managers of huge pools of public's capital in mutual funds and pension funds. Such managers want to know whether to invest in pharmaceutical industry in these politically trying times, and, if so, in what type of company. And why. Physician investors, waxing euphoric whenever new drug revolutionizes therapy, would be well advised to ponder cooler assessment by this den-mother of big investors: biotechnology (the human genome and all that) is a business, like any other. Physician idealists, denouncing encroachment on medical science by medical-industrial complex, might listen to more measured cadence: the role of public— particularly