Just a couple weeks after suggesting that Great Britain’s failure to control animal rights extremism would deter Novartis from investing there, Novartis last week announced it will spend hundreds of million of dollars to build a state-of-the art research facility in Boston, Massachusetts.
Novartis will kick things off with a $250 million, 400 research center in an MIT-owned research park called Kendall Square.
From there Novartis expects to expand quickly. It is already in talks to lease another building in Kendall Square and is also reported to be looking for 2-3 other buildings in the area to lease.
Novartis joins Pfizer, Wyeth and Merck as companies that have chosen to invest significant research dollars in Cambridge, Mass.
The big loser in this, of course, is Europe. Europe used to be the hands-down winner in drug research, but it is quickly becoming an also-ran due to an unfriendly cultural and legal climate.
According to The Financial Times of London, of all research dollars spent in Europe and the United States, only about 41 percent of that money went to the United States. Today the figure is 58 percent. As a whole, European companies currently conduct 34 percent of their research in the United States, compared to only 26 percent in 1990.
Europe is far behind the United States when it comes to biotech, which is one of the reasons that attracted Novartis to the Kendall Square facility.
The upshot, of course, is that as the United States continues to receive the disproportionate amount of pharmaceutical investment, the animal rights movement’s focus could switch to the United States more than it has. On the other hand, the social climate is far more hostile to the animal rights movement in the United States.
After all, Great Britain’s left-liberal candidate used to brag that he would ban the hunting of foxes with dogs, while the U.S. left-liberal candidate in the last election bragged about how he had hunted as a boy in order to shore up his support in rural areas.
The recent defeats the animal rights movement suffered in the 2002 Farm Bill is a good example of just how little influence the animal rights movement has on national politics in the United States (one of the many benefits of not having a proportional representation system).
Source:
Seeking freedom in New England: The decision by Novartis to move research to Boston is the latest step away from Europe by a big pharmaceutical. Daniel Dombey and Victoria Griffith, The Financial Times (London), May 8, 2002.
Novartis coming to Cambridge. Scott van Voorhis, The Boston Herald, May 8, 2002.