Worth checking out:
WBUR’s story on a DYI drug developement;
This capital-efficient model is all the more essential now that the credit markets have dried up. Before, you needed to build a company so Wall Street would take you for real, so you could do an IPO. Today, the better way to go is to sell proven drugs to a large pharmaceutical company desperate to fill its pipeline. Hence these one man, one drug firms, though it’s not always one man, one drug, as Sheila DeWitt can attest.
The Globe’s report on a BC study that correlates research dollars with publishing success. Beware. Even the author says it’s misleading.
In his survey of 72 universities, which compared each institution’s levels of federal funding with the number of high-quality studies published there, some well-known schools fared well; others, very poorly. Private schools and universities with medical schools — like Harvard and BU — tended to perform well.
Schools with a focus on engineering, including MIT, often ended up near the bottom. That may have nothing to do with the productivity of MIT researchers, Litwin said, but rather, because there is less of a focus on publishing in engineering, or because much of the work is done for the military or corporations that may not want results made public.
Litwin presented his study late last month at the annual meeting in Toronto of the Association for Institutional Research.
Finally, the Endorcinologists are meeting in Boston. As is usual with these meeting, they tend to cover themselves. Here’s a link to their daily.