The weekend was an eye-opener. Talented women with more degrees than Carter had liver pills sat around our dining room table and bitched about their treatment in their jobs. Compared to the men, they were being screwed. Lower salaries. Lower bonuses. And lower titles.
Jumping up and down will get them some gains, but not equality.
The only long-term solution is for them to start their own business. Some professions — like engineering and medical — are made for starting. Others involve The Tarzan Theory — swinging from one vine to the next.
I’m climbing over young women friends of my daughter to start their own business. Good news: they get preference in government bidding. One young engineer emails me:
Harry,
I don’t know the first thing about writing a business plan so I am not sure where to begin. Any suggestions?
I do. First, what’s the business we want to start. Let’s start by describing it. A paragraph will do.
Then what are the elements of the business we’re going to need? Look around your job. What do they have? An office? A marketing department. A finance department. Describe each one. How many people will we need? What type of people? What will they do?
That’s a good beginning. We’ll fill out more in coming months, as we learn more.
I think women are better at business than men. They understand customer service. They understand men better than men do. And they can pick trends long before men.
See below for one stunning woman.
Pounding the table for Apple. Cramer now says Apple is the great retailer. He raised his target to $325.
Seeking Alpha says “If you truly believe Apple is in growth mode with a growth product like the iPad and a growth market like the PC/laptop market on college campuses, then a forward P/E of 30 on $15 earnings per share puts Apple shares closer to $450 at year end.”
Fortune magazine says Apple “faces a nemesis that can paralyze any stock: the tryanny of high expectations.”
Between the lines, I read that Fortune’s editors are annoyed they don’t own Apple stock.
I’m going with Cramer on this one, though I’m waiting for a pull back before buying any more Apple.
This woman is wonderful. Her name is Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey. She’s 96.
This is the story about her from yesterday’s New York Times. If this story doesn’t blow your mind, nothing will:
The Public’s Quiet Savior From Harmful Medicines
CHEVY CHASE, Md. — She is unlikely to be mentioned at any 50th-birthday parties this year, but she is the reason many of those celebrations will take place.
Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey is 96 now, nearly deaf and barely mobile, as modest as her faded house in this Washington suburb. And though her story is nearly forgotten, she was once America’s most admired civil servant — celebrated for her dual role in saving thousands of newborns from the perils of the drug thalidomide and in serving as midwife to modern pharmaceutical regulation.
On Wednesday, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, will honor Dr. Kelsey with the first Kelsey award. It will be given to a F.D.A. staff member annually. The award will come 50 years after Dr. Kelsey, then a new medical officer at the agency, first sat down to consider an application from the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati to sell a sedative named Kevadon, which was widely prescribed in Europe for morning sickness in pregnancy.
As it turned out, the drug (better known by its generic name, thalidomide) would cause thousands of children in Europe to be born limbless or with flipperlike arms and legs. With her probing analysis of Merrell’s application and her insistence on scientific rigor, Dr. Kelsey ensured that the effects in the United States were far more limited.
The thalidomide disaster led Congress to pass legislation giving the F.D.A. authority to demand that drug makers prove their products safe and effective. Moreover, Dr. Kelsey helped write the rules that now govern nearly every clinical trial in the industrialized world, and was the first official to oversee them.
“She had a huge effect on the science that we all take for granted today,” said Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard and the author of “Reputation and Power” (Princeton, 2010), a definitive history of the F.D.A.
The inauguration of the Kelsey award may also be a telling sign of where Dr. Hamburg stands in a series of internal agency struggles. For much of the past two decades, the F.D.A. has emphasized speed over certainty in its decisions — an industry-friendly stance that plays down safety concerns in favor of getting potential cures to the market as swiftly as possible.
But a series of drug, medical-device and food-safety controversies have led some agency medical officers to insist on better information before approving products and to lobby internally for risky products to be pulled from the market, putting the speed-oriented old guard on the defensive. A celebration of Dr. Kelsey, the patron saint of the agency’s safety-first faction, is bound to cheer those calling for greater caution.
Dr. Kelsey might never have reached the F.D.A. in the first place if her first name hadn’t sounded like a man’s.
Born in 1914 in British Columbia, Frances Kathleen Oldham was sent to a private boys’ school because her parents expected her to become as educated as her older brother. She was hired sight unseen by Dr. Eugene Geiling, a renowned pharmacology professor at the University of Chicago, because he read her name as Francis. When she got the acceptance letter, in 1936, she realized his mistake and asked a professor at McGill University whether she could accept the job.
“When a woman took a job in those days, she was made to feel as if she was depriving a man of the ability to support his wife and child,” Dr. Kelsey said in an interview at her home. “But my professor said: ‘Don’t be stupid. Accept the job, sign your name and put “Miss” in brackets afterward.’ ”
She was soon put to work helping Dr. Geiling establish the toxicity of elixir of sulfanilamide, a medicine that would be linked with scores of deaths because it contained a deadly industrial solvent. The scandal led Congress to strengthen drug regulations, giving her a role in two of the three seminal events in F.D.A.’s history.
While at Chicago, Miss Oldham earned a Ph.D. and soon became enamored of a fellow member of the pharmacology faculty, Fremont Ellis Kelsey. About that time, she tried an experimental malaria drug and turned entirely yellow. She was asked to provide urine samples every 24 hours, and one of the collection times coincided with a play to which he had invited her.
“So I had my little jar with a tight sealing top and a paper sack, and during intermission, I went to the toilet,” Dr. Kelsey said with a smile. “And then I got panic-stricken. Could I get to my seat without dropping this thing?
“So I walked out the bathroom door, and there was my future husband, who relieved me of the bag. I thought it was the most thoughtful thing he could do. He knew I would be worried.”
She arrived at the F.D.A. in 1960 as part of a new cadre of scientists who had begun insisting that drugs show clear evidence of effectiveness as a condition for approval, even though Congress had yet to grant the agency explicit authority to enforce that. Drugs could be sold 60 days after their makers filed information with the agency as long as it did not object; companies routinely sent new remedies to doctors and asked them to try the medicine in patients. Such testing was uncontrolled and entirely anecdotal.
Dr. Kelsey demanded better tests for thalidomide. She also distrusted Merrell, a company that had a history of confrontations with the F.D.A. She soon discovered that Kevadon had been linked in Europe with reports of nerve damage — reports the company had failed to provide her.
“I had the feeling throughout the day,” she wrote after a meeting with company executives, “that they were at no time being wholly frank with me and that this attitude has obtained in all our conferences, etc., regarding this drug.”
Company officials complained about Dr. Kelsey to her superiors, who supported her. When evidence became irrefutable that Kevadon caused horrendous birth defects, the company quietly withdrew its application.
Merrell executives had been insisting that “I was depriving people of this thing,” she said in the recent interview. “And then when it happened, I was so relieved to get them off my back. Amazing.”
Dr. Kelsey’s role in the saga would have remained little known if not for a front-page article in The Washington Post — which, in turn, led to legislation giving the F.D.A. far more power over the drug industry. President John F. Kennedy gave Dr. Kelsey the Distinguished Civilian Service Medal, and a picture of her accepting the award wearing a black dress, holding a white purse and looking demure but competent became the iconic image of the agency.
“It was up in Maine, where he had that summer home,” Dr. Kelsey said. “He was handsome and very pleasant.”
With the F.D.A. given far more power, Dr. Kelsey set about with others at the agency to write rules for medical testing that created three distinct phases for human trials and strengthened rules for human protections and conflicts of interest. These rules have since been adopted worldwide. As the historian Dr. Carpenter put it:
“She and the F.D.A. had a huge role in determining the terms and sequence of what is now modern clinical science.”
I like my Apricorn Aegis drive.
Check Favorite Tools on right.
How to say NO. My friend sent this email to someone who wanted money.
I’ve decided to decline your proposal.
I think it has merit and potential and the initial investment is small. I also don’t fully understand the business. I just don’t want to bother with another small investment. Virtually all of my investments have been large and important enough to me for me to get personally involved at least as a working Director, often CEO or Chairman. This just doesn’t fall into that category. Sorry, but that’s my view. I hope you will be successful and rub my nose in it as a missed opportunity. Thanks for thinking of me.
Pretty gutsy? Me? I would have said. “No thank you. Your proposal doesn’t suit my present investment goals.”
Two imponderables.
+ What do you call an Australian in a suit?
The defendant, your honor.
+ What do you get when you play a country music song backwards?
You get your house, your wife, and your truck back.
Harry Newton who ponders the joys of “retiring” to work at home. The last couple of days have given excitement a whole meaning. Have I told you about the leaky toilet, the blown light bulbs, the busted telephones, the fallen drapes, the rusted pillowcase, the stuck refrigerator door and the non-steaming clothes steamer? Today is a new day, with new excitements. I can’t wait.
