Nerdy Science Blog

Ranjit Barshikar wrote an article regarding to the future of pharmaceutical industry in Asia.

20th Anniversary Special Feature: the rise of Asia

India, China and Singapore are expected to become leaders in the pharmaceutical sector. India and China have become major suppliers of APIs, with India also exporting high volumes of pharmaceutical dosage products. South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan and Hong Kong are also creating strong pharmaceutical bases, although these markets are mainly dominated by MNCs. More clinical trials are also being conducted in Asia and India has taken the lead in clinical trial outsourcing. Asia is now returning to GDP levels of the 19th century when it was at its highest (12%). According to Goldman Sachs, India is expected to become the world’s third largest economy by 2050. Many MNCs are investing and building their businesses in China and India, and it is expected that total pharmaceutical sales in China (at current levels of approximately $14 billion [€9 billion]) will double to $28 billion (€18 billion) by 2010.(1)

Ranjit pointed out the factors that cause the growth of Asian market are:

• population factors
• clinical trials
• R&D innovation
• generics companies
• cost advantages
• regulatory support

Anna Kushnir, PhD wrote a letter to wired science.

Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men?

Take my graduate school for example: My class was made up of eight people — seven women and one man, or 7 to 1. He was Snow White and we were the seven dwarves — each with a remarkably appropriate nickname. I was Grumpy, should you be curious to know.

Snow White and at least four of the dwarves have continued on to postdoctoral research jobs. That is a 4 to 3 ratio of women who went on to do a post-doc to those that chose alternate career paths.

Everything is adding up so far, right? Lots of women are around. Lots of science is being done. All is well.

The next set of numbers is slightly puzzling, however. That is the ratio of female to male professors in our department, at a well-respected academic institution, is 48 to 7 men to women.

Interesting reversal, isn’t it? We go from 7 to 1 in grad school to roughly 1 to 7 in professorships.

Perhaps the only way to solve this problem is made men pregnant.

John made a catchy comment, “Funny Anna thinks its fine for the grad program to be almost all women, but not okay for the senior professors to be mostly men.”

(link [pic])

This is another hockey evolution t-shirt.

I realized that most of the evolution t-shirts I posted here have smaller evolved people.

The price for this t-shirt is $23.99, and there are several colours for you to choose.