【英语科技】英国制药业之父

It is particularly sad for me that James Black, the Nobel prize winning chemist, should have died in the same week that my latest book, Obliquity, is published. I am indebted to Black for helping to frame the idea – and for proposing the term “obliquity” to describe it.

A young lecturer at the University of Glasgow, Black was recruited just after the second world war to be one of the first of ICI's pharmaceutical researchers. Britain's leading chemical company had shifted from dyes and explosives into fertilisers and petrochemicals. After the war, the company's executives recognised the contribution drugs – notably penicillin – had made to the allied war effort. They conjectured that the most exciting new business applications of chemistry would be in pharmacology.

ICI's decision was prescient, but slow to pay off: the pharmaceutical division lost money for 20 years. Markets today would not tolerate unrewarding and risky investment on this scale. But Black and his group eventually discovered beta blockers, the first effective treatment for high blood pressure, and a therapy still used every day by millions of people around the world. The pharmaceutical division quickly moved into profit, and when it was floated off from the parent company as Zeneca, it came to command a higher market capitalisation than the company that gave birth to it.

But that would be far in the future. In the 1960s, when beta blockers went through clinical trials, the modern pharmaceutical industry was still in its infancy. Black believed the company's first priority was to recover its investment: he was required to spend time on the promotion of beta blockers which he preferred to devote to fresh research.

So he left ICI for rival Smith Kline. Black believed that the science behind beta blockers – interference with the receptors through which the body reacts to chemical stimuli – had many other applications. He was right, and his next discovery used this principle to treat stomach ulcers. Smith Kline's anti-ulcerant, Tagamet, was another blockbuster. When its discovery was announced, another British drug company refocused its research programme to concentrate on similar therapies. Glaxo's version, Zantac, would become the best-selling drug in history and transform the company from a struggling also-ran into a world leader.

Black's work was central to the development of not just one, but three British pharmaceutical companies, and he can properly be identified as the father of Britain's most successful postwar manufacturing industry. He created more shareholder value than any other individual in Europe over the period. But this was no part of his intention. He joined ICI because it offered a stimulating and well-funded research environment, and he pursued pharmacology because he was interested in the science.

More than 10 years ago I interviewed him on his reasons for leaving ICI. He described how in the 1960s the environment of ICI was, as he saw it, beginning to change: it was not just the profits from drugs that were making the company more financially oriented. The brilliant chronicler of British society in that era, Anthony Sampson, wrote in 1965 that under Paul Chambers, ICI's first non-scientist chairman, “a company known to the public primarily for its care for workers and research, associated with profit-sharing and university fellowships, suddenly emerged as one of the most relentless of all big businesses”.

Yet it was not Chambers' acquisition strategies, but Black's research, that made money for shareholders. The consequence of the changed culture was that he made money for a different company (although not much for himself). Black went on to say: “I used to tell my colleagues that if they wanted to make money, there were many easier ways to do it than drug research. How wrong could I have been! In business as in science, it seems that you are often most successful in achieving something when you are trying to do something else. I think of it as the principle of ‘obliquity'.” Thus the idea of my book was born.

就在我的新书《迂回》(Obliquity)出版的那周，诺贝尔化学奖得主詹姆斯?布莱克(James Black)竟然与世长辞，对此我感到特别的难过。我要感谢布莱克帮助我构思了这本书的理念，同时也正是他提议用“迂回”一词来描述这一理念的。

第二次世界大战刚刚结束，格拉斯哥大学(University of Glasgow)的年轻讲师布莱克就受聘成为了英国帝国化工(ICI)的首批药物研究员之一。这家英国首屈一指的化学公司的专攻领域早已从染料和炸药转向了化肥和石化产品。战后，公司高管们认识到药品（尤其是盘尼西林）在战争中对盟军做出的巨大贡献。他们由此推断，化学最令人兴奋的新商业应用将出现在药理学领域。

ICI的决定虽具有超前意识，但很晚才收到回报：该公司的制药部门连续亏损了20年。今天的市场不会容忍没有回报又如此高风险的投资。但布莱克和他的团队最终发现了β受体阻滞剂(beta blocker)——第一种有效治疗高血压的药物，而且时至今日仍为世界各地的无数人使用。制药部门迅速实现了盈利，而当该部门从母公司剥离，作为捷利康公司(Zeneca)独立上市时，其市值甚至超过了孕育它的母公司。

但那都是很久以后才发生的事。上世纪60年代，当β受体阻滞剂经历临床试验时，现代制药业仍处于襁褓之中。布莱克猜想，ICI的首要任务是收回投资：他接到了推销β受体阻滞剂的任务，但他宁愿用这些时间来进行新的研究。

因此，他离开了ICI，加入了ICI的对手史克公司(Smith Kline)。布莱克相信，β受体阻滞剂背后的科学原理——干扰人体中对化学刺激作出反应的受体——还可以应用于许多其它病症。他是对的。他的下一项发现就是利用这种原理来治疗胃溃疡。史克的抗溃疡药泰胃美(Tagamet)同样大获成功。史克宣布这一发现后，另一家英国制药公司将研究项目重点转向了类似领域：葛兰素公司(Glaxo)采用相同原理的抗溃疡药善胃得(Zantac)后来成为历史上最畅销的药品，并使这家苦苦挣扎的落后者一跃成为全球领军企业。

布莱克的研究极大地推动了三家（而非仅仅一家）英国制药公司的发展，因此他可以当之无愧地被视为英国制药业之父，而制药业也成为英国战后最成功的制造产业。他在那个时期所创造的股东价值要超过其它任何一位欧洲人。但这并不是他本意所在。他加入ICI是因为该公司能够提供一个充满激情而又资金充足的研究环境，而他投身药理学是因为这是他的兴趣所在。

10多年前，我曾就布莱克离开ICI的原因采访过他。布莱克从他的个人视角出发，向我讲述了上世纪60年代ICI研究环境发生的变化：导致公司愈发以经济利益为导向的决不仅仅是药品带来的利润。那个年代英国社会的杰出记录者安东尼?桑普森(Anthony Sampson)在1965年写道：在ICI首位非科学家出身的董事长保罗?钱伯斯(Paul Chambers)的领导下，“一家曾主要因其对工人与研究的关注而为公众所知、且与分红制和大学奖学金联系在一起的公司，突然间转变成最为冷酷无情的大企业之一”。

然而，为股东赚取利润的不是钱伯斯的并购战略，而是布莱克的研究。企业文化改变的后果是，布莱克去为另一家公司赚钱了（尽管他自己并没有从中获得多少好处）。布莱克接着说道：“过去我常常对同事们说，如果他们想挣钱，有许多途径都比进行药品研究要简单得多。瞧我错得有多么离谱！你在某件事上取得最大成功的时候，往往是在努力实现着另一件事，似乎在商界和科学界都是如此。我把这看作‘迂回'原理。”我这本新书的理念就是由此而来的。

译者/管婧