On Topic: It's a small (and complicated) world after all

When I'm 110 years old, in an assisted-living facility while watching the weather channel and looking back over my life, the incident probably won't count as my most embarrassing moment. I intend to have lots more catastrophes that'll eclipse this one.

But at the time it certainly was in the top five.

We were hosting some 330 attendees for a life-sciences forum in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan - home to the Van Andel Institute and, as elsewhere in southwest Michigan, a growing number of biotech start-ups. Through a partnership for the event with the VAI (started by the same folk who brought you Amway), the business newspaper I edited managed to entice a bumper crop of engaging panelists.

Seated on the dais were eight highly influential leaders from different aspects of the broad life-sciences industry - specialists in development, testing, throughput and commercialization.

These really, really smart folk had brought to market some world-famous drugs.

My job was to introduce them, then field the Q&A session. Some of the panelists I already knew, others I'd met only that afternoon.

Moreover, each of these speakers had a CV as long as my leg, peppered with words my long-ago, random study of Latin couldn't quite work out. (“Cellular oncogene”? “Exonuclease”? “Mutagenesis”? Wait, isn't that Greek …?)

Which meant during the intros I needed to rely on my notes far more than usual.

Things started out calmly enough. I introduced each panelist in turn, reading brief highlights I'd culled from their resumes, twisting my tongue slowly around the multi-syllabic terminology.

But as I was about halfway into the information for panelist No. 4 - president of a community college that had just announced a major throughput center - disaster struck. In mid-sentence, as turned the page to continue reading, I realized my stack of notes were no longer in order.

Wait, what? The next bit was some tedious housekeeping stuff about refreshments and parking reimbursement.

I turned back to the previous page. Then skipped forward two pages.

I looked at the 330 people in front of me - they looked back.

Lightning did not strike me stone dead, though that was what I sincerely was hoping for at the time.

What seemed like many minutes later, I found my place in the notes. The population of the world resumed breathing, and time started flowing again.

What I learned from that experience was to always use staples, not paper clips.

What I also gleaned from that afternoon, and from subsequent events and interviews with professionals in the biotech and life-sciences fields, was that we all have challenges. Large and small, the industry has not had an easy row to hoe.

Start-ups struggle with funding - states' loyalty to life-sciences support wavers, with promises made and broken. Moreover, they're doing work that often can't be fully explained in an elevator pitch to venture-capital angels. (“You're going to produce what, which will help create a link between what and what?”)

And let's keep in mind, ingenious scientists aren't necessarily also financially resourceful business entrepreneurs.

Established companies also have had their hurdles. Back in Michigan, Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical maker, in 2003 bought Kalamazoo's biggest employer, a descendant corporation of a homegrown company.

That was a company whose founder's children and grandchildren still shopped in area stores and who actively supported hometown causes. A company to this day still referred to by locals as “Upjohn's.”

Residents were anxious. Then Pfizer began efforts it labeled as “reorganization.”

A few thousand jobs were cut, or those functions were moved to other states. Then more jobs were pruned.

Frustrated community members wanted to know Pfizer's plans - how many jobs were to be eliminated, and when would this “reorganizing” be done? Some civic leaders expressed fear that simply asking questions would antagonize the giant.

The New York-based corporation revealed little. A spirit-building rally for employees at one of the facilities that summer served tiny fruit cups.

Fruit cups.

In one locally famous public meeting on the matter with state senators, the up-until-then-cautious economic-development agency president angrily pounded his fist on the speaker's desk and demanded answers from absent Pfizer executives.

He didn't get answers that day, or any time soon.

The reason? As Pfizer's Kalamazoo communications chief confided to me, they simply didn't know: The shifting of jobs in the various capacities of pharma R&D and manufacture depended on global market trends, and those definitely were moving targets.

Some of that is just as true today industrywide.

Biotech and life-sciences companies - whether massive or counting only a handful of employees, building more-reliable knee replacements or searching for a treatment for the effects of some form of cancer - perform complex work in a sophisticated, highly regulated climate.

As any business should strive to do, they are trying to do good and make good.

Plus, they have to know Latin. Or maybe Greek.