I’m starting to think that there’s something about the time scale of drug discovery that makes it a poor match for a number of important things. (No one out there thinks that I mean that the whole process moves too quickly, do they? Good.) When I speak to people who don’t know anything about the business, they’re always amazed to find how long it takes to get a drug onto the market. I think that’s because the general public, when it thinks about science-driven industries, has a mental picture formed by computers and consumer electronics.

Well, at least you hope that they do, because the folks whose mental pictures are formed by watching TV shows and movies have an even less realistic view. But it could be worse, as you realize when you encounter the third layer of people, the ones who get their convictions from infomercials and quack web sites. As an aside, while the first two groups are surprised to find out how long drug development takes, the third bunch seem mostly convinced that we’ve already discovered lots of cures that we’re holding back out of sheer malice and hand-rubbing glee. Trying to talk them out of this worldview is not always a worthwhile way to spend one’s time.

But back to electronics: those product cycle times are much shorter, partly because of fashion, but mostly because the underlying technology is constantly changing. Pharmaceuticals, on the other hand . . . well, a cell phone from 15 years ago would look pretty strange right now, but a drug from 15 years ago looks just fine. It should: in some cases, drugs discovered 15 years ago are just now hitting the shelves. Getting one through in as few as eight years is rightly considered an extraordinary pace.

This has a number of effects, and very few of them are good. The first one, as has often been noted, is a mismatch with Wall Street. Now, those people can have attention spans that make the infomercial-watchers look like Marcel Proust. They’re impatient even with quarter-by-quarter updates, so waiting several years while preclinical and clinical research plays out is more than some of them can take. That’s why, when you look at the stock market chatter around the biopharma industry, the small-cap end of things is over-represented. There are a lot of small companies down there, whose stocks are living and dying on single big events. And there are enough of them so that every day or so brings more news: failure, success, buyouts, deals. These are the things that markets live on; to many people, that’s what the stock market is all about.

The stories of the larger companies move more slowly, though, and trying to fit them into the always-something-popping framework leads to distortions. For many companies, there really isn’t much news for long stretches. Drug candidate X is in the clinic — but we won’t know anything until next year. Drug candidate Y has some pharmacokinetic problems — no, we don’t know when we expect to have them fixed. Drug Z is on the market, at long last — no, we don’t have sales figures for you yet. The effect is a bit like the cable news channels, which have to fill their airtime even when not much immediate news is going on in the world. The big stories — economic and sociopolitical ones, in many cases — are hard to cover, so the hours get filled with photogenic crimes of little real importance, celebrity news, sports, and scandal.

But there’s another time scale mismatch, and that’s with management. Consider the calendar of drug development as compared to the tenure of many top executives. If your top spot (or top spots) are turning over every six or eight years, how can any one person make any kind of coherent difference in how a drug company is run? If they start some big new internal strategy, odds are they won’t be around to see how it works out. It’ll be up to the next group of execs to figure that out, and likely as not they’ll come in ready to implement their own grand strategies, even before the previous ones have had their chance to come out the other end of the python.

This, I think, is one reason (among others) that we see mergers and acquisitions. Sensible or not — and there’s always a way to spin them — these deals happen quickly enough that they take place on someone’s watch, and with someone’s fingerprints on them. The consequences may take years to play out, but the initial deed is done on a time scale that everyone can grasp. If a chief executive officer wants to be able to point at what he’s accomplished, a big deal of this kind is the instant answer: “I bought this.”

That also has a bearing on some other strategies that it’s easy to be critical of, such as stock buybacks. One view is that these are admissions of defeat. A company is saying that buying back its own stock is a better use of its money than the ostensible business of drug discovery. But if you have stock to buy back, you have investors to keep happy, and this is another move that gets announced immediately and easily understood form. “We’re going to make your shares worth more, starting now” is the message, and what shareholder doesn’t like hearing that? There’s another factor to think about – a company may be sitting on more cash than it knows what to do with, and this tends to make the shareholders jumpy. After all, they can hold cash themselves; they own the company’s shares on the idea that the executives are going to do something profitable.

But this reminds me of an accident report I once read. A metals company had a terrible fire with liquid sodium (a nice fire with liquid sodium is hard to picture, admittedly). It was in a waste room where smaller amounts were burned off on purpose, but a larger amount was causing trouble. And while the firefighters didn’t make the mistake of using water, fortunately, they did make the mistake of shoveling sand and salt onto the mass with a wet shovels, which ended up injuring a lot of people when the whole thing went up. The conclusion of the accident report, though, was what stayed with me: the best response, it said, would have been to do nothing at all. There might still have been an explosion, the investigators said, but at least a bunch of firefighters wouldn’t have been standing next to it when it happened.

But doing nothing is sometimes the hardest course of action. You can imagine these trained firefighters, facing what is inarguably a raging fire: just the sort of thing they’re trained to deal with. Telling them to stand back, put down all the equipment, and take five while things continue to burn wouldn’t have been easy (and it wouldn’t have been easy to make that order stick, too, most likely). The same thing happens with money inside a public company; telling the shareholders that you’re going to do nothing with it won’t work (unless maybe you’re Apple). And telling them that you’re going to plow it all back into the research labs — with a payoff who knows when — might not go over well, either. Better to do something, buy something, even if it’s your own shares. That at least happens now, and as long as “now” is better than “later on,” that’s what we’ll get.