Figures brace themselves against the wind on the vespertine Jungfernstieg as if they belonged to a detonated group of question marks from which the wind had torn away the words. Several of the bent figures flee the rain toward a white house that, for these northern climes, is excessive. I\\\'m not following them because I consider myself a lost word, but because I had planned to go there anyway. In the anteroom, a gentleman appearing to be the butler removes my drenched overcoat and tells me that it\\\'s quite all right. Once in the light, I feel beggarly in the suit that, up until now, I felt was outrageously expensive. Nobody here buys off the rack.
A blonde lady at the second door verifies whether my name can be found on the list at her fingertips. It takes her forever to do so. My schedule tells me that a kind person, aware of my special interests, has acquired a pass for me to the exclusive Hamburg Merchants\\\' Club. Now it\\\'s beginning to take even longer, and I think this person has either forgotten me or the schedule doesn’t know what it’s talking about. It keeps getting more and more embarrassing, and I feel like leaving when her icy eyes finally discover my four letters.
Nearly everyone in the room behind the draconic doorkeepers is older than I am. A projector casts the evening\\\'s theme onto the wall between marine paintings: “Tomorrow\\\'s Drugs Today.\\\" The room is packed and I\\\'m amazed at the looks of the interest group for the latest drugs, or people who want the future now. I take a seat.
Punctually at the scheduled starting time the heavy door is locked and not opened again, even though the bell is still sounding from outside. A jovial gray-haired gentleman, who introduces himself as the president of the club, opens the evening event, expressing a few well-chosen thoughts on the topic of ethics and Alzheimer and then hands it over to the experts. The manager of a highly familiar firm in the avant-garde segment of the healthcare industry – which calls itself \\\"biotechnology\\\" – prefers to introduce himself as a representative of the “Life Industry.”
Initially, he acts as if the issue here were research. Then, in his PowerPoint presentation, he displays pictures of colorful tissues that were taken in the nerve system. The pictures keep coming as the deeply moved life industry manager tells how these magical meshworks are like art to him. An affirmative murmur rises all around me in an audience otherwise accustomed to German Art Informel and Pollock and Warhol\\\'s piss-pictures. The life industry manager once again overlays the proclaimed life-as-art with a bit of science and then quickly turns to economic issues. The audience sits up and pays attention. The people here want him to get to the point, and their point is money. Not glossing over this point is regarded in these circles as simply being straightforward. Soon enough it is clear that the life industry manager is here to hawk – that is, to collect investors for his company. It will take a lot of them to achieve an ideal world out of this life-as-art – otherwise known as health. As millions are at stake, this plea for help is not experienced as undignified in any way; rather, the potential investors feel flattered, knowing they are needed in the big life-industry game.
Thanks to geographic coincidence, plenty of the listeners can afford to make a contribution. Those sitting here were positioned at the right time at a hub between East and West, which allowed their capital to work for them through the Hamburg harbor, bestowing unbelievable growth rates and leaving them standing here today as globalization winners. The idea was to make money out of the same things with which they had always made it. Possibilities were stumbled upon that allowed them to arrive at the future while avoiding progress. True, ships and cranes were improved on occasion, but there is no need to pay these developments much heed.
Since even in times of plenty the attainment of nourishment dictates consciousness, honorable merchants deduce that one only needs to express limited interest in progress or cultural change. Life goes on without it, which is why they are such a rewarding audience for the life industry manager. In periods of extreme accumulation of wealth, when it can no longer be parked in safe assets such as container ships or in real estate in Dubai or Shanghai, occasionally a shady desire surfaces for playing poker with the future. This is the attitude with which the organizers wooed them tonight to this exposition of the third industrial revolution. The fact that the radical upheaval in production conditions supposedly promised by the life industry might not even occur is irrelevant for the time being in the dark brown wood-paneled chamber. The merchants who were drawn here from their offices through the pouring rain were looking only a minor titillation, as if they were walking into a casino with easy money in their hands. Perhaps there\\\'s not even more in it than that, because the life industry, walking in the shadows of greater events heralded for the future, is in a strangely static condition – not to say that it\\\'s creeping droopingly, barely hunched over. What would surely startle optimists is for the attending merchants precisely the limitation in the offer that makes it interesting. This is why the thankful audience listening to the apparently realistic life industry manager seems more and more intrigued.
To begin with, the speaker provided some background information, explaining that, for consumers, the drug as product – still the most important form of goods for the healthcare industry – means first and foremost a quick remedy for problems, or at least a way to defer them for the time being. In clear contradiction to the rapid cure they promise, the development of drugs is a sluggish, capital-engulfing enterprise. The rule of thumb is that, on average, 8-11 years and $800 million are currently necessary to develop an innovative drug – and these numbers are still growing. In 1975, a similar development would have cost only $150 million.
Surprising is the fact that innovations are becoming more and more seldom. The number of new drugs has fallen by more than 50% over the past 20 years. This is not because companies cannot afford the expense – on the contrary. But the investment simply does not pay off. It appears that the access to innovation is congested.
If, during the development process, something more than a marginal improvement in a longstanding drug emerges, the rare wonder of an innovation needs to be subjected to a highly intensive marketing campaign in order to recover the massive development costs, not to mention the numerous dead-end laboratory endeavors. The product not only needs to break into the market, it also must be exploited for an extremely long time. That is why older drugs are continually renamed for years and decades for varying areas of application.
The situation is currently severe since numerous pharmaceutical patents are expiring in 2007, and new replacements are not available. For this reason, the pharmaceutical research industry began years ago, more or less discretely, to buy up imitator companies – ones they had previously considered to be annoying parasites – in order to sneak into this market and ultimately become their own parasites. As Sergio Bologna concisely formulated it for other fields in the last edition of springerin, the life industry no longer lives for innovation, but rather for returns on investment.
In what can be described as post-innovative capitalism, our economy today is settling into a kind of ongoing recycling of bygone progress. However, rather than lying around idly, capital is still being invested in residual hopes of exploitable developments, as if it were sitting at a roulette table. The life industry, with its excruciatingly lethargic balls falling from the wheel, offers a special appeal. And when, after years of waiting, a ball does finally land on a number, awe-inspiring purchase prices such as that paid by Google for YouTube suddenly appear humble. Last year, for example, GlaxoSmithKlein paid $600 million not for a whole company, but rather for the rights to a single product with the catchy name HuMax-CD20, from the small Danish firm GenMab. The alleged motive was to compensate for the poor results of its own research department.
Perhaps, though, the intention in the life industry for the past several years has not really been to secure its own survival through progress. One does well enough living on past developments. And what if, as far as I\\\'m concerned, HuMax-CD20 doesn\\\'t develop into a relevant medicine for leukemia, with annual returns of $2 billion as GenMab has forecast. Maybe it is not that important. The incinerated cash is good for write-offs, even if tomorrow\\\'s drug simply remains a rerun in the spirals of retrospection.
It is conceivable, however, that innovation only plays an illusionary role for investors, as if it were a ritual repetition of the past. Investment in innovation could then be understood as a hypermodern potlatch – making a sacrifice in order to secure a grace period for renewal.
The life manager did not get to these thoughts, although they might very well have fallen on sympathetic ears at the overseas club.
Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
