微生物学和酶学中的应用认知是由来自信息革命的创新“以设计获得发现”（discovery by design）所推动的。在此之前，新药物的发现主要依靠甄别化学实体，以找到抵抗疾病的活性分子的种随机试错技术。20世纪70年代中期，研究人员开始采用他们的新知识，“使所谓“理想”分子的结构概念化，学者们希望这种理想分子能够修复被改变的（病态）平衡。然后把这种理想分子结构提供给实验室化学家，由他们据此寻求分子结构与理论模尽可能紧密匹配的物质”。这样的方法让科学家第一次在分子水平上理解疾病，并且把注意力集中于在所有生命形式中控制关键生物化学序列的酶。在两种新的光谱学技术X射线晶体学和核磁共振一一的帮助下，在数学计算和计算机分析方面取得巨大进步的支持下，药物发现的新模式不断得到强化。 (查看原文)
By the 1920s the creation of the infrastructure had been completed. Of the fifty leading chemical companies and the thirty leading pharmaceutical companies in terms of revenues in the 1990s, only two chemical companies had entered successfully and they did so during World War II. (查看原文)
In market economies, the competitive strengths of industrial firms rest on learned organizational capabilities. ... The capabilities are product-related in terms of technologies used and markets served. These product-related capabilities, moreover, are learned and embodied in an organizational setting: individuals come and go, but the organization remains. Thus, in modern industrial economies, the large enterprise performs its critical role in the evolution of industries not merely as a unit carrying out transactions on the basis of flows of information, but, more important, as a creator and repository of product-related embedded organizational knowledge.
The process of organizational learning in industrial enterprises begins with the building of a viable profit-making enterprise, which i... (查看原文)
In 1995 Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz merged to form Novartis and began quickly to sell off their chemical businesses.
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Thus by the end of the twentieth century, the American chemical industry consisted of two multisectored core companies, Du Pont and Dow, as well as a number of specialty chemicals manufacturers still focused on products commercialized in the 1920s or in the 1940s and 1950s. The oil and gas companies produced feedstocks, basic petrochemicals, and commodity chemicals. Except for the German and Swiss companies, which from the start had commercialized pharmaceuticals, the European multisectored chemical companies had also become producers of specialty chemicals. For example, Britain’s ICI, after spinning off in 1993 its most profitable division (pharmaceuticals) as a separate ente... (查看原文)
The most important lesson to be gleaned from the table is the very different beginnings of the pharmaceutical industry in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the first movers were German and Swiss core chemical companies, which commercialized drugs based on organic chemistry. From their beginnings in the late nineteenth century, these giant enterprises quickly led the world in commercializing drugs and did the same in dyes and photographic film.
This was not the case in the United States. Of the major U.S. core firms listed in Table 1.2, eight of the ten (all but Merck and Pfizer) created their initial integrated learning bases in the 1880s and 1890s, after the completion of the railroad and telegraph networks. They were, in the jargon of the day, “wholesaler/producer enterprises.” O... (查看原文)
The World War II crash programs in penicillin and sulfa drugs transformed the pharmaceutical industry by providing financing that expanded research and facilities even more than did those in high-octane gasoline and synthetic rubber in chemicals. The resulting “cascade of discovery,” first in penicillin and other antibiotic drugs—those miracle cures for infectious diseases—and then in other therapeutic areas, led to rapid growth along the prescription path. The result was a therapeutic revolution, underwritten in part by the simultaneous rapid growth of the healthcare insurance industry. In 1929 sales of prescription drugs accounted for 32 percent of all consumer expenses for medical drugs; by 1969 that figure had risen to 83 percent. (查看原文)
The evolution of the pharmaceutical industry during the 1970s and 1980s differed dramatically from that of industrial chemicals. Whereas the chemical industry encountered limits to growth and began restructuring, the pharmaceutical industry enjoyed new opportunities as advances in scientific learning introduced new technologies to be commercialized for worldwide markets. This new scientific knowledge created two sets of opportunities and with them different challenges.
The first set of opportunities emerged from the new sciences of microbiology and enzymology and the new learning in biochemistry.
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The second set of opportunities was much more revolutionary. The advent of the new scientific discipline of molecular biology, which evolved from the discovery of the molecular structure of D... (查看原文)
The Europeans, in fact, created the modern chemical industry in the late nineteenth century, when German and Swiss producers in the Rhine Valley took advantage of local sources of raw materials and energy and of relationships with local universities and research institutes to establish formidable enterprises that dominated world markets until World War I.
The evolution of the European chemical industry differs in significant ways from that of the American chemical industry. First, the world wars disrupted production and closed off markets for the powerful German companies, leaving them in the wars’ aftermaths to face much stronger competitors abroad. Second, because of World War II, the European companies, including the Germans, were latecomers to the polymer/petrochemical revolution, alt... (查看原文)
The second world war had an even more far-reaching impact on the chemical industries’ barriers to entry worldwide than did World War I. Not only were the Rhine Valley companies isolated from the world markets again for over a decade but, even more significant, the coming of World War II had launched the polymer/petrochemical industry, the second major period of the commercializing of new technologies based on new learning in chemical sciences and engineering. The American chemical and petroleum companies became world leaders. (查看原文)
In 1999 Exxon acquired Mobil. In the next year Chevron took over Texaco. Two years earlier, Chevron and Phillips merged their petrochemical units. Next, in 2002, Phillips and Conoco, the company Du Pont had acquired after its response to the oil crises of the 1970s, announced their merger and the formation of ConocoPhillips.
The other significant consolidation was British Petroleum’s acquisition of the two most successful U.S. companies that entered petrochemicals during World War II: Amoco in 1998, and Arco shortly thereafter. By early 2003 there were five major players in international petroleum markets—in order of their revenues, ExxonMobil, BP Amoco, Royal Dutch Shell, ChevronTexaco, and ConocoPhillips—all still producing petrochemicals. (查看原文)
In the late 1940s and 1950s, as the opportunities created by the opening up of new paths and the enhancement of new technologies expanded, the number of new drugs introduced rose from an annual average of roughly twenty in the 1940s to fifty in the 1950s, and then fell back to an annual average of fewer than twenty between 1963 and 1969, and even fewer in the 1970s. New regulations governing pharmaceuticals exerted a significant impact on these figures, but the pattern was similar to that in chemicals.
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The 1970s saw two fresh waves of drug innovation that created new opportunities calling for the restructuring of existing learning bases and the building of new ones. The sources of new learning for the first wave rested on scientific breakthroughs in biochemistry and in the new discipli... (查看原文)
The applied learning in microbiology and enzymology was propelled by an innovation from the Information Revolution: “discovery by design.” Previously, the discovery of new drugs had depended on a hit-or-miss, trial-and-error technique of screening chemical entities to find the molecules active against disease entities. In the mid-1970s researchers introduced their new knowledge “to conceptualize the structure of an ‘ideal’ molecule that is expected to restore the altered [pathological] equilibrium. The ideal molecule is then given to the laboratory chemists, who search for substances whose molecular structures match as closely as possible the theoretical model.” This approach involved for the first time an understanding of disease at the molecular level and focused attention on the enzymes... (查看原文)
作者: 小艾尔弗雷德·钱德勒 副标题: 现代化学工业和制药工业的非凡历程 原作名: Shaping The Industrial Century：the remarkable story of the modern chemical and pharmaceutical industries isbn: 7508038967 书名: 塑造工业时代 页数: 432 译者:罗仲伟 定价: 39.00元 出版社: 华夏出版社 出版年: 2006-1 装帧: 平装
