Wayne Koberstein

No greater challenge faces any writer than the empty page. To sully that beautiful white space with mere words can seem so arrogant, so pretentious, that one's urge is to leave it alone, in perfect blankness. To paraphrase an old writer's adage, just to begin may require lowering your standards-an act salvaged later only by careful editing.

Tne product still in naming, a potential Big Pharma partner, and a foothold field force in North America-those were the works in progress when we toured Eisai Co.'s headquarters and operations in Japan a few years ago.

We all feast from the same kettle-and this season, we're not just feasting; we're swimming in a war-fired stew of events and issues.

Don't try this at home. That ought to be the common lesson we draw from most examples of pharma's current performance in the public arena.

On the last stop of a recent trip, I checked into the Bethesda Marriott. It was late afternoon, and as I entered my room, I flicked on the TV set and switched to the cable news. "Five Shootings, Five Dead, in 17 Hours," read the streamer, while the large screen showed a map of the area west of DC.

PR is more than free ink. It is even more than good free ink.

I was wondering whether I could take any more pain, when the moment slowed to a crawl. Pain wakened fear. Eternity lingered alongside. Mortality, grinning over my shoulder, blew a chill breath across the nape of my neck. "Dying would end the pain," I thought. "But I don't want to die like this."

Rarely does the head of a top pharma company agree to meet with a journalist in the midst of a strategic challenge as large as this one-Merck's plan to establish Medco Health Solutions as a separate, publicly traded company.

Pharmaceutical companies and their marketing partners face a common dilemma: how to translate scientific progress into market success. Despite huge investments, R&D never seems to produce an adequate number of products with blockbuster potential.

Sixteen years ago I began to edit Pharmaceutical Executive, a magazine unknown to me only a few months before. Today, I wonder how much I've learned in all the time since.