Top of the morning to you and a fine one it is. Blue skies, cool breezes, and plenty of chirping birds are enveloping the comfy Pharmalot campus, which is cause to fire up the coffee kettle for yet another cup of stimulation. Our choice today is strawberry creme — sweets for the sweet, you know. Meanwhile, we have assembled the latest menu of tidbits for you to peruse. We hope you have a wonderful day, and please do keep in touch. Once again, we will note that our settings have changed to accept postcards and telegrams. …
Two former Pfizer executives said they will not be involved with activist investor Starboard Value, which reportedly wants the company to make changes to turn its performance around, CNBC writes. The announcement by former Pfizer chief executive officer Ian Read and former chief financial officer Frank D’Amelio came just days after news of the activist’s stake broke. In a statement issued by Gugenheim securities, which has long advised Pfizer on dealmaking, Read and D’Amelio said they were “fully supportive” of Pfizer chief executive officer Albert Bourla. The pair had been in contact with a number of directors shortly before news broke Sunday evening that Starboard accumulated a stake of about $1 billion in the company. The about face comes just days before Starboard managing member Jeff Smith was slated to meet with Bourla. For executives to join, and then walk away from an activist’s campaign is highly unusual. It was also not immediately clear what impact, if any, the breakaway would have on Starboard’s campaign.
Over the past decade, there has been a clear and unprecedented exodus of young life scientists from academia and into lucrative industry jobs, but new data provide evidence that this trend is slowing, at least for now, STAT tells us. The latest numbers from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, an annual National Science Foundation census of freshly minted Ph.D. graduates, show that 61.6% of biomedical scientists who had a job lined up were bound for industry in 2023. That’s a sizable dip from 66.5% in 2022, breaking a decade-long trend of nearly continuous annual increases in the share of graduates headed for the private sector. As the proportion of industry-bound researchers dipped in 2023, the percentage of graduates going into academic jobs increased from 18.8% in 2022 to 22.1%. But more granular data provided by NSF showed that, in 2023, about 75% of these jobs were non-tenure track positions, compared to 70.6% in 2022 and 66% in 2021.
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