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Show Pharmaceutical Industry Leads It's no news to most Americans that intensive medical and pharmaceutical research is behind a great majority of the new drugs used so successfully today to combat such one-time killers as tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza and many other diseases. The greater part of the research involves the development of new medicines or of new production methods to lower the costs of medicines and thus bring them to more people. But there is another kind of research which is equally, important to the pharmaceutical industry, the Health News Institute points out. That is basic research. Basic research brings in no dollar profits; devises no saleable sale-able products; creates no new production shortcuts. . Yet, according to a study conducted by Science, American industry in 1953 spent more than $150,000,000 and utilized the talents of almost 6000 scientists in what the National Science Foundation has defined as "projects which are not identified with specific product or process applications, but rather have the primary objective of adding to the overall scientific knowledge." To conduct its share of basic research, the pharmaceutical industry employed more than 850 scientists in 1953. These researchers published more than 600 papers on their work I approximately 20 per cent of all basic research studies published pub-lished in that year. In 1953, basic research cost the pharmaceutical industry more than $16,000,000. This came to more than ten per cent of all the money spent by private industry on basic research, and from 20 to 25 per cent of the pharmaceutical industry total research budget. In comparison, all American industry during that year spent an average of about four per cent of the total research budget on basic research. , The largest pharmaceutical manufacturers alone spent almost al-most $11,000,000 on basic research in 1953. In comparison, the 115 largest petroleum companies spent $10,000,000 on basic research; thel09 largest chemical companies spent $18 million on basic research, and the 186 largest manufacturers of electrical equipment also spent $178,000,000 on basic research. The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry employed more basic researchers per 1,000 employees, 4.5, than any other industry. in-dustry. The chemical industry employs 1.27 basic researchers per 1,000 employees and the electrical equipment industry only .43 per 1,000 employees. |