Pfizers Acquisition of Pharmacia: An Analysts Perspective. Content-Wire Jul 17 2002 2:07PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

$60 billion is a lot of money. There are not a lot of big pharmas left to merge. Everyone expects Galxo to finally make a move on Bristol Meyers. Then it may be time for them to strta really picking up biotech companies. One of the rationales for the Amgen-Immunex deal was probably to make it more difficult for a big pharma to swoop in and buy either one separately.   7:24:08 AM    

The signs are clear: Immunex is no more as Amgen completes takeover. Seattle Times Jul 18 2002 2:14AM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Not a bad story from Luke Timmerman. He was outside Immunex the other day as people were headed out to hear various presentations. Several of my scientific colleagues were approached by him but were not inclined to talk. While this story is mostly accurate, several of his earlier ones had enough inaccuracies to upset people. They did not want to help further more pain so that the Times would have a front page story. All in all, the people at Amgen have tried to make the best of this transition. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before the formoer Immunex employees reassert their creative powers and reapply themselves to doing cutting edge work.  7:16:13 AM    

Somehow the information technology industry, which is still riding Moore's curve, should be able to make some lemonade out of this. We're learning about the pitiful information technology at the SEC and the FBI. They desperately need the combo of weblogs and search engines. Their legacy systems are horribly out of date. Off to the glue factory. Meanwhile the general stagnation in the software industry, which is the core the western economy now, is a huge problem, and people aren't even talking about it. We're stuck behind a horribly inefficient system for trying out new ideas. A Hollywood movie gets much more funding than a breakthrough software idea. That seems out of whack to me. The venture capital industry doesn't get money into the hands of the unemployed technologists in Silicon Valley. We could do so much better than we are doing. There are so many people who now would appreciate a good job with a nice steady salary and a health plan. OK, the VCs don't want to make that kind of investment. Who does?? [Scripting News]

I see a real need for the same sorts of tools in biotech. There is a HUGE amount of information and bioinformatics is working on tools to mine that information but hardly anything is being done to create knolwedge from that information and dispersing it. Weblogs and news aggregators, such as Radio, hold part of the solution.

An example: When I still worked at Immunex, I was working on getting Radio into the hands of scientists. I has used Stapler to create newsfeeds for 50 on-line journals we had access to. Some of these journals now up date their sites daily. Radio allowed these scientists to quickly be updated about new articles and then permitted them to post them to others can see. There are a lot of us scientists who LOVE being the first person to tell others about a new article. Radio allows us to do this so easily. Then others would be able to comment on whether the conlcusions in the paper were correct or BS, whether the protocols followed were rational, etc. It is through the interaction of human beings, the conversion of information from tacit to explicit and back again, that knowledge is created. This is an area that I want to spend my time in the coming months.

And, since I do not have a job, I will have lots of time;-)  6:55:19 AM    

Being RIFed (Reduction In Force) was a suprise but something that probably will allow me to move in directions that were closed before. I hope so.  6:42:20 AM