Editor’s Notes:

Our second (and last) article on Europe’s floundering pharmaceutical industry highlights one aspect of the U.S. market that is typically left out of the discussion: how the U.S. attracts human capital—scientists who come here because they both want to do well for themselves, and do well for others. It is, you might say, a prescription for the American dream.

The struggling European pharmaceutical industry has lost more than jobs and investment money. Scientists have been leaving Europe, too. German biologist Katherin Jansen is one of them.

Jansen took a job with Merck & Co. at its sprawling campus in West Point, Montgomery County, in 1992, and soon launched a program to develop a vaccine against human papilloma virus, the cause worldwide of hundreds of thousands of cervical cancer deaths each year. She doubts she would have ever been able to do that in Europe. "There was too much hesitancy to go forward with anything that was new," Jansen said. "They were way too conservative."

The relatively swift development of the vaccine, which is expected to win final approval from the federal Food and Drug Administration later this year, shows why companies increasingly choose the United States as the place to develop new drugs. Merck scientists who worked on the HPV program say that critical to the drug's development was an FDA practice, begun in the early 1990s, that emphasizes speedy approval. Merck's interest and the FDA shift took place when Jansen's career was just starting - and worked to her advantage. Now one of 400,000 European scientists in the United States, Jansen landed her first job in Switzerland after completing her postdoctoral work in the late 1980s at Cornell. But when a former colleague mentioned that there was a position with Merck's vaccine program in the United States, she jumped at the chance. …

Speedier approvals and close consultation between the FDA and drug companies seeking approval for new medicines were mandated by the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. Under the law, drug companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees to the government; in exchange, the FDA has added staff and accelerated its reviews. It is one reason that drug approvals in the United States are much faster than they are in Europe. And one reason why scientists such as Jansen work in the United States.

Jansen’s story is certainly encouraging. Many scientists in the industry often labor their entire careers without shepherding a single new drug through FDA approval. It is a vastly complicated science, and failure—not success—is the prevailing outcome.

What ultimately attracts European scientists to American pharmaceutical companies is the same quality that attracts poor laborers from Mexico: the opportunity to pursue a dream.