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Interlude IV

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©2014

 

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, with revenues of $17 billion and 50,000 employees in 50 countries. Our mission is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer.
- Thermo Fisher Scientific: About Us

         I would like to take a moment to step away from all this theoretical mythology stuff and just shake my head in frustration. Thermo Electron corporation originally began as a company that produced laboratory instrumentation. Fisher Scientific was, in past decades, the go-to source for all laboratory supplies. Seriously, the famous Fisher Catalogs of the 1990s were like coffee table books, suitable for display. In 2006, these two companies merged to become Thermo-Fisher. In 2012, Thermo-Fisher bought a successful company called One Lambda, which supplied the laboratory where I was working with much of its diagnostics materials and analytic software. Less than one year later, Thermo-Fisher-(Lambda?) bought another genetics testing company: Life Technologies, which also had a long history of doing business with my lab. So... Thermo-Fisher-(Lambda-Life?) The upheaval that followed is something that I should probably not go into here, for fear of charges of libel! Suffice to say that I, personally, did not think this was a very good thing for our lab.
         Telecom and finance are not the only industries where companies are buying each other at alarming speed and becoming mega-corporations. Pharmaceutical companies are quickly becoming giant multi-national corporations that are concentrating the power of the medical industry, in the form of both materials and patent rights, into just a few hands. It seems that start-ups in the industry sell out at an alarming rate, as soon as they achieve some level of success. The pharmaceutical industry in general does very good things for humanity, but, like everyone else, it cannot be accountable only to itself, and to progressively fewer major players, at that.