Capturing the Chimera

Tom Branna, my editorial director, walked into my office in the summer of 1999, tossed a folder onto my desk, and announced, “Good news! We’re launching a new magazine and you’re going to be the editor!” (That’s how I remember it, although Tom may’ve actually structured it as a “Good News / Bad News” statement.)

The folder held the pages of the new magazine’s business plan. It opened with:

Contract Pharma is the only magazine devoted exclusively to meeting the information needs of the burgeoning contract services sector of the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry. The industry’s reorganization in the early 1990’s has led to a significant paradigm shift in drug discovery, development and manufacturing. . . .

“Well!” I thought, reading page after page of the plan. “I’m not sure what all this means exactly, but it sounds like it’ll make an interesting read!” And my education began.

A few months later, we published the debut issue of Contract Pharma. Explaining its mission, I wrote on this very page:

Faced with quarter-by-quarter earnings expectations, merger mania, regulatory pressures and a host of other issues, pharma and biopharma companies have been forced to rethink their approach to [business]. The dream of vertical integration has, in many instances, given way to the reality of inefficiency and corporate bloat.

Both my florid prose and my and reliance on list-making were on display early, but I’m heartened to discover that I had some idea of what I was writing about back then. (Sure, I had my share of silly ideas — who can forget the concept that “one-stop shopping” was the wave of the future? — but it’s not like I was the only one to fall for them.)