The Lost World Drugs, Chemicals, and Associated Te…

The Lost World
Drugs, Chemicals, and
Associated Technologies

“Phone my family,
tell them I’m lost
on the sidewalk–
you know it’s not OK”
~Wilco

Every March, the Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association (DCAT) holds what has become the biggest black tie dinner in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria. Executives from chemical companies that serve the drug industry converge from around the world, and it turns into a weeklong event with dinners and luncheons, conferences, and usually a drug manufacturing technology trade exposition called InterPhex at the Javits Center. There are so many meetings from early in the morning to late at night that I usually stay in the city. I always stay at the Chelsea Hotel, where I lived for a short time with a friend named Jay in 1981 and ’82.

There are old memories at the Chelsea as well as some more recent ones. “DCAT Week” is a nostalgic time for me–the trip to New York, the short residence at the hotel, and the big dinner roll up into a bittersweet experience. I’m immersed in several worlds that I left behind.

The Eight Hundred Pound Magilla

Tuesday morning worked out perfectly. I drove to Metropark Station in Edison, NJ, which is across the street from my office. I got to the city early enough to check into the hotel and catch a cab to the Javits Center, register at the InterPhex press office, and hear the keynote speaker, Greg Simon, president of a consultancy called Faster Cures. Simon’s presentation will help with a big story I’m working on–a story for which I am supposed to be “on sabbatical,” decks cleared of all other work, for two months.

The story is the eight hundred pound gorilla in my hatbox in this trip. It is supposed to culminate in an eight-page cover story, the kind of thing I’m used to writing in a little more than two weeks with a very cluttered deck. My topic: The future of the pharmaceutical industry. Jeez. Expectations at the home office in Washington, DC, are hard to gauge at this point given the magilla that they’re making of the whole thing. The psychological impact of this assignment cannot be underestimated. Suffice it to say it is a committee-designed project. Two other writers in DC, Sue and Bob, are working on it with me–each of us have been journalists for more than twenty years, and we are actually being asked to submit first drafts! Irregular! Sue, Bob, and I spent the first few weeks bumping into each other and not getting much accomplished. Very whiney phone calls ensued, and the situation kind of bogging down. So I came to New York for DCAT Week hoping to get a little traction.

With Simon’s presentation in the bag, so to speak, I swung back to the Chelsea already feeling better about things. I picked up my tape recorder and set off around the block to meet with a newsletter editor at Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He gave me some of the background I need to understand patient advocacy. This too would be great for my story. AIDS activist groups like Act Up and GMHC are arguably the reason the drug industry broke rules to get experimental drugs into patients in the 1980s. They have been instrumental in advancing AIDs drugs to the point where HIV is no longer an automatic death sentence. The drug majors deserve credit, but I’d hate to think where they would have gotten to without very savvy patient groups that understand the research protocol and make their expectations known. On Wednesday I’d meet with the head of research at Pfizer, a tough-minded supporter of his beleaguered industry who nonetheless views Act Up and other patient activist groups, such those focused on breast cancer, as partners. The advocates are taken seriously and deserve enormous credit.

The World is Flat Already

I got on the guest list for dinner Tuesday evening at the Indian Consulate, which is just off 5th Avenue on East 64th Street in that stretch of the city called “Museum Mile.” It actually has far many more embassies and consulates than museums, though it does feature the Met, the Frick, and the Jewish Museum, three of my worldwide favorites. The Consulate is housed in the kind of elaborate white stone building one would expect. Inside it is sparsely furnished, which is also typical of many foreign government outposts in cities like New York and Paris. It has lots of bureaucratic office space, some of which can on a moments notice accommodate a banquet of Indian cuisine.

On this night, sadly, the food had to wait as a roster of speeches from executive at obscure Indian chemical companies led the evening. Thanks to recent changes in patent laws, these firms will soon be manufacturing a lot of the chemicals used in making drugs–a development long feared by U.S. and European producers is upon us. The speakers’ PowerPoint presentations were jammed with tiny words and the program went overtime by almost an hour. I hung out in the hall a lot, enjoying the juxtaposition of ancient Indian culture and drugs of the future, both of which were palpable.

The food, when finally served, was delicious, of course. And the event was the first of many chances to meet with other journalists, many of whom I know and some of whom I’ve worked with. The atmosphere on the chemical industry business press junket is, in fact, highly collegial with little of the kind of competitiveness one might expect. I like it like that. I met an interesting writer for Nature–an Indian woman working in New York. We read each other’s magazines.

There was nobody there from Chemical Week , the New York-based magazine where I worked for eleven years up until 2002.

Let’s Do the Numbers

Wednesday morning began at the Waldorf with a presentation by well-known analysts and a speech by my editor-in-chief. He leaned heavily on a story I had written and a stock roundup my colleague Lisa had written. We sat next to each other cringing as our names were bandied about by the boss in front of the pharma luminaries in that big hotel.

From there, it was back again to the Chelsea.

The Chelsea Hotel has Wi Fi coverage in the lobby. This has resulted in maybe the one significant change at the place in the last 25 years—the space is now populated with people using laptops. It kind of ruins the ambiance of the beautiful lobby, which is dominated by a big mahogany fireplace and art donated by tenants in lieu of rent over the years. There is the big black and white painting of the Dutch Masters cigar box. A three-D painting called Chelsea Dogs with a dachshund stretched across the bottom. A pink piñata-like figure of a fat lady hangs on a swing overhead. The scene served as another reminder of how the social gathering spaces of the 21st century have taken on a nasty tinge—we are all communicating with someone outside the physical gathering space. It’s antisocial. Isn’t it? Well, maybe. Does my friend in New Mexico get anything out of being connected to a “user” in the Chelsea lobby? Does the landmark New York hotel take on any extra panache when its guests are channeling New Mexico, Old Mexico, Berlin, wherever? I just don’t see it. Delightfully, however, there was a young blonde waif tapping away on her laptop in the corner who talked nonstop with everyone. She gave me a big smile when I came in and hunkered down for e-mail.

A Whole New World

Back in my room, I interviewed the head of research and development at Ely Lilly. Then it was off to Pfizer World Headquarters to interview his counterpart at the world’s largest drug company.

The Pfizer building on the far east end of 42nd Street features the most rigorous security check of any office building I’ve been in. They take your photograph for the visitor ID badge. They put bags through a museum style X-ray rig. The guards are big and wear blue. None of this is surprising. The premise of my big story is that the pharma industry is experiencing a kind of transitional crisis. The price of drugs, the drop off in significant new drug introductions, and safety concerns al la Vioxx have essentially made the industry a kicking boy. Important people have compared Big Pharma to Big Tobacco in the public arena. That’s probably going too far. The good news for the industry is the flood of new technology, the revamping of research, and a serious drive toward efficiency improvements. Pipelines are not at all empty. Then there is the decoded human genome, which poses great opportunities and challenges and has generally created confused expectations. At any rate, the industry is on guard. And it is a whole new world, right?

When my story is done, I will put up a link. I don’t want to start writing it here, but I will say that the sweet spot in the Pfizer interview was when I asked John La Mattina, the head of R&D, if he is personally affronted by attacks on the industry. I felt like Barbara Walters asking such a touchy-feely question. But it drew the man out. He had a lot to say in response–it is the industry’s response. Watch this space.

I had mentioned in a brief post I put up early in the week that I planned to do these interviews. It garnered some interest from Kizz at 117 Hudson, who writes very thoughtful things on medical issues from time to time. She e-mailed me with a question about cancer research and I responded. She wrote it up.

A Museum of Water

I had planned to attend a dinner at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum hosted by a Swiss chemical company called Lonza on Wednesday night. Lonza informed me on Tuesday, however, that I was only ever on a waiting list, and it wasn’t going to work out. No cheesy wax Elton for me. But that suited me fine—a night to myself in NYC was not at all a problem. And it wasn’t long before a hotel guest—or a guy hanging out in the halls—invited me to a different kind of soiree: The inaugural party for the New York Museum of Water. Sometimes it’s that easy. I was on my way.

But first, I stopped at the hotel restaurant, the neighboring El Quijote, a magnificent Spanish place. Friendly people at the bar. Spanish bartenders with elaborate manners. And clams. European ambiance. Olé!

The “Museum of Water” turned out to be a temporary front for the Chelsea area art galleries hosted by the very well meaning man I met at the hotel. Asher Shomrone, who is also associated with the New York-based Embassy of Water (no address on his card), told me of the worldwide effort to protect our aqua environment. He walked me through the cultural significance of water—it’s connection to women’s rights, its economic importance, its general potential to improve life on earth, not to mention its role in sustaining life as we know it. Water, he told me, plays a part in things as essential as communication. Alternative energy?—yeah, that too. I walked around a bit. It reminded me of why I didn’t renew my membership in a co-op gallery around the corner. It was a fashion show, basically. The gang at the El Quijote was much more interesting. I took off to Soho, the neighborhood that the galleries left when they moved to Chelsea and got creepy, to see a movie—Capote. Olé!

Robots Count Pills

Thursday began with a trip back to the Javits Center. This time I combed the exhibit hall, making it to a scheduled interview with Honeywell’s controls division. It used to be that to work for this company, you needed to be six feet tall, thin, with jet black hair. You had to look like a motivational speaker, and you had to live in Phoenix. My interview was with a much more shorter, wider, and more normal guy, though a few of the old school Überman Honeywellers lurked about the booth. I got a lead on work the FDA is doing to loosen up control system validation requirements, thus allowing drug makers to install 20th century computer controls in their manufacturing plant. That’s a step in the right direction, huh? The show floor featured robots, shiny vessels, pill counters, and a blue-goop flow machine.

I took a cab, which is now possible to get at the Javits Center, to the Waldorf for a luncheon with a speaker from a small start-up drug firm called Vertex. He explained how the drug industry is like an inverted film industry. Most of the crowd thought he meant extruded polygoopalene film at first. But he meant film as in Titanic and Harold & Kumar go to White Castle. His point had to do with intellectual property and outsourcing. He was sharp and compelling. I asked him the question that Kizz fed me. See, again, her post.

But the best part of this luncheon was milling around the big lobby beforehand. A stylish man with a fedora and gray goatee slept in a big chair. He was right out of Eloise, but at the wrong hotel. There is a small mezzanine on which Cole Porter’s piano stands front and center. Two rooms down is the reception area with the famous clock.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

In other years, I’ve spent the time between the lunch and the gala walking around the city. In 2004, I did so in an early spring snowstorm. I had only recently left Chemical Week, thereby ending a twenty-year run of working in Manhattan. I was also in kind of a nostalgic mood because it was the first year I’d stayed at the Chelsea since my residence there in 1981. And it was snowing. I’d gone out to dinner with Nancy, my coworker at Chemical Week, the night before at a café that was exhibiting paintings I had done of New Orleans. I floated the idea of a dual portrait of her and our friend Kara–I would do it in May of that year at the Chelsea. Things were rocky at home, actually, and I was probably flat-out depressed. I remember walking the streets, earphones on, taking in the city visually and listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a melancholy album by Wilco that describes an eerie and beautiful sense of displacement. It gets its name from the military code for the letters Y, H, and F, and Wilco got the idea from the Conet Project, a recording of mysterious codes broadcast from an international shortwave radio network–a constant broadcast that every government in the world claims does not exist. I came to own every image from every song on the album during DCAT week that year. It’s been special ever since.

After the lunch this year, however, I went back to the Chelsea, did a little lobby Net surfing, put on my tuxedo, which made me look like the most extravagant freak at the hotel, and kicked off to the subway for a ride back to the Waldorf. There is nothing more strange than riding the NYC subway aware that everyone thinks you are in a Mariachi band.

The Bull and Bear

I arrived at the Waldorf for the main event. The first stop, as always, is the Bull and Bear, an adjoining bar that kind of describes itself. In it, one touches base with famous salesmen in the chemicals game. They are always buying, especially for reporters. It’s pushing it, I know. But, hey, everyone does it. And given that the night ahead has often been called the Tail Hook Party of the chemical industry, a beer on the dime of a shoeshine isn’t such a serious transgression.

After the Bull and Bear, I like to stop and spend some time in the glamorous reception area with people in black tie and evening gowns milling around that fabulous clock. After that, the liquor is free and guiltless. I went to the cocktail reception and met Nancy from Chemical Week. My fondness for Nancy is nearly out of bounds, I must say, and we get together very infrequently these days. Big old kiss, hug, and smiles, a chat, and then off to our allotted seats at different tables for the gala.

Here is the typical kind of bullshit one runs into at the DCAT dinner. Because my magazine has given all its seats away to advertisers, I have to beg around for an invitation to a chemical company’s table. It’s actually a better place to sit most of the time. This year, however, my host at the table where I’d landed an invitation pulled me aside during the luncheon to explain that the CEO’s wife was in town and there may have to be “some moving around.” This could only mean Journalist Boy having to head back to the bar during dinner, so I finagled an invite at another table from a guy in the lobby. At the cocktail reception, I went up to my original host, hoping he wouldn’t mind that I bailed. When he saw me, he said, “No worries, we have a seat for you.” He smiled nervously. I said I could find other accommodations if it’s tight. He looked from side to side and whispered, “I owe you one.”

Yes, that’s me. Mr. Charming.

Who’s Your Daddy?

I don’t have to work particularly hard to keep politics out of Verb-Ops, because I find almost everything else a lot more interesting. Every now and then, I cross over, however, and I’m about to do so now.

The speaker at the gala was George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States. I was never a big fan of the elder President Bush. I certainly never voted for him and was happy to see his obnoxious sense of entitlement shattered by Bill Clinton. He has, however, acquitted himself quite well with his son in the White House. He has wisely avoided discussing issues, hardly speaking at all during the 2004 campaign, for example. And he has worked on the humanitarian front over the last year, teaming up with Bill Clinton to support efforts in the Gulf and in Asia after the tsunami. Most recently, he traveled to Pakistan as an envoy from the United Nations after the earthquake. He’s a decorated war hero with a rather serious resumé—CIA chief, ambassador to China and the United Nations, vice president and president. I thought there was an outside chance he’d be a tolerable, maybe even an interesting speaker.

The event always fills the grand ballroom. It opened this year with a musical routine from a tacky group called the USO Singers. A benediction was given not, as in past years, by a priest, rabbi, minister, or imam, but by a Pfizer executive! That bit of irony perked me up a little. We ate and I chatted with the folks from the German chemical company that invited me to sit at their table—their US operations are in Pittsburgh, and I’ve always liked people from that city. Germans and Pittsburghers. Ja gut! Soon, it was speaker time.

Bush’s surprise warm-up act was Darrel Hammond, the Saturday Night Live comedian that used to do Clinton (one would have preferred Dana Carvey given the keynote, but Hammond is quite funny). Bush, on the other hand was irredeemable.

It all came back to me—the patronizing anti-intellectual crap that drove me crazy when he was in the White House. He made fun of Clinton for knowing what reverse osmosis is when they spoke with aid workers about a water filtration system on their tsunami tour. He dismissed genomics—in front of this crowd!—as some kind of techy stuff “or whatever.” You’d think he was back in the supermarket in 1992, confronting the scanning system at the cash register.

Here’s a highlight from his speech: “You’ll never know what it’s like to turn the corner into downtown San Francisco and see the worst looking people in the world waiting for you, led by the ugliest woman you’ve ever seen carrying a sign that says ‘Keep out of My Womb.’ Well, hey, no problem lady!”

What ignorance. My real problem was that the crowd of chemical and drug industry execs loved him. The men and women in the audience whooped in frat-boy approval and laughed at all of his jokes. Not surprising, though. This is the drug industry, and they love Republican politics. I have to admit that they behaved themselves in 2003 when Bill Clinton spoke on the very day we invaded Iraq. Obnoxiousness was kept at the local level around the tables.

I really did give Bush the benefit of the doubt. I mentally prepared myself not to react like a knee-jerk liberal Yahoo, because I know that knee jerking is usually too easy on occasions such as this. And it’s lame. What’s more, I’ve heard and enjoyed big name Republicans, including Newt Gingrich for Christ’s sake, at this dinner. I heard Bob Dole speak in March, 2001. Grumpy Bob Dole–I can still see him on television in the 1980s saying things to interviewers like, “Tell George Bush to stop telling lies about Bob Dole.” Well, Bob Dole was a pleasure to hear speak. He was funny, self- deprecating, and engaging. Bush was none of these things. Dole came across as if he had a notion of what the people in the audience do for a living. Bush didn’t seem to care. Dole worked with Daryl Hammond, who also opened the show in 2001. Bush was condescending and mocked the comedian for laughs. Sadly, he got them.

To top it off, the crowd went along with Bush’s image of his wife, “Bab,” as the irascible, loving Grandma. No sale here, I must say. I would hear on the radio the next day about the money Barbara Bush donated to schools serving Katrina refugees from New Orleans in Houston with the stipulation that the money must go entirely to purchasing educational software from her son Neil’s company. Many of the executives at the DCAT dinner have at one time or another told me they’ve met the Bush family or know them personally. They invariably implore me to believe that the Bushes are a really nice family. They always protest too much.

Chelsea Dogs

The rest of the night was the usual post-gala booze-up in a hundred suites throughout the Waldorf. It’s like a two-dimensional black and white nightmare. There used to be grown men openly begging strange women for sex, right there in the Cole Porter suite! But that’s all toned down in recent years. I met a Chinese woman from the World Health Organization and told her I wanted to set up an interview with her for my story. She couldn’t be bothered. China is changing, man. I’ll tell you. I left at about midnight, quite finished with DCAT Week.

Back at the Chelsea, the laptop crew was punching it up. The pretty blonde waif from that afternoon rode up the elevator with me, but didn’t turn around to see me until we got off. She told me I looked handsome in my tuxedo. I responded with an awe-shucks “thank you,” got changed, and went back down with my laptop. Blondie was already set up across the lobby in a white faux rabbit fur coat when I got there. A neighbor with a little white and black dog came in the front door, and Blondie started talking fast and high to the animal. It hopped across the room to her in a way that I’ve only seen happy cartoon dogs hop. It scampered past the “Chelsea Dogs” picture and jumped into her lap.

Man, I love it when dogs smile.

Good night!
Vanx

All photos Verb-Ops 2006
“Bullshit” doodle by Verb-Ops
Portrait sketch by Todd Groesbeck from
.Verb-Ops photo posted last night.