Now, Peter Goodfellow runs the discovery wing of the world’s second largest pharmaceutical company, where his 1500-strong workforce creates drugs targeted at particular proteins. He has had an impressive career. “Did I get the job?” he jokes.

Goodfellow cut his teeth as a scientist at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in the 1980s just as the exciting new techniques of gene sequencing were coming on-stream. Researchers like him were beginning to harness the technology that could turn biology into a predictive science like chemistry or physics. “We believed that if we could marry classical human genetics and molecular biology we’d be able to unlock the power of genetics and use it to study humans,” he says. This marriage allowed the individual genes responsible for diseases like cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy to be isolated and studied, and produced an understanding of the genetic damage that leads to cancer.

The research he and his fellow geneticists were doing at the ICRF some 25 years ago is only just beginning to bear fruit. For example, he produced an antibody that binds to the receptor for a key cell growth factor, which a colleague later showed was involved in the uncontrolled cell division that occurs in cancer. GSK recently announced the positive results for clinical trials of an anticancer drug that targets a receptor in the same family. “You see little things like that and you think, this actually makes a difference,” he says.

New tools

At 35 he became principal scientist at the ICRF, and in 1990 a team at his lab found the gene switch on the Y chromosome that turns mammalian embryos into males. The lab’s main aim was to locate cancer-causing genes, but the discovery of SRY (sex-determining region, Y chromosome) confirmed the power of the techniques they were helping to pioneer. “We didn’t exactly set out to [discover SRY], but we set out to create the tools that would enable us to do things like that.”

In 1992, he moved to the University of Cambridge to head the genetics department, and after four years he founded a biotech company called Hexagen, which whetted his appetite for drug discovery. In the space of a year, he had taken a job at SmithKline Beecham. “I only meant to stay a few years, but I sort of fell in love with the industry. I found the challenges of making drugs all-consuming. I think it’s the most complicated undertaking humans do – more complicated than sending people into space. All the engineering you have to put into one molecule to make a drug is mind-blowing.”

Right now the pharmaceutical industry faces another huge challenge: its image. In August 2005, a jury in Texas awarded $253 million to a widow who claimed her husband died of a heart attack as a result of taking the painkiller Vioxx, made by US pharmaceutical giant Merck. The award was later reduced to $26 million, but Merck is up against thousands of similar cases with litigants claiming it played down safety fears. In 2004, GSK had difficulties of its own when the New York attorney-general Eliot Spitzer accused it of suppressing negative results from trials on the use of its antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) in children. The drug was never licensed for use in children, but doctors often prescribed it “off label”. The upshot was that GSK has since become the first pharmaceutical company to set up an online clinical trials register summarising results from all of its studies of marketed medicines, and so far more than 2000 have been posted to the register.

“If I thought GlaxoSmithKline deliberately withheld evidence, I would leave the company”

Goodfellow insists GSK did nothing underhand. “If I thought Glaxo deliberately withheld evidence, I would leave the company,” he says. It has long been common practice for drug companies to submit mainly positive results to peer review journals, he says, but there has been a sea change in attitudes supporting full disclosure, which he welcomes. However, he believes the principle of full disclosure should apply to everyone: industry, academics and doctors alike. Failure to make clinical results public is a universal problem, he says. “You shouldn’t point to one section of the community and say it’s OK for you to do it but not for others. So if a doctor prescribes something off-label and sees useful information, that should be shared too.”

At any rate, uncertainty over drug safety is something the high-risk pharmaceutical industry can ill afford. It takes 15 years and $800 million to bring a drug to market. In the 1990s, the sector boomed thanks to a succession of “blockbuster” drugs, each with sales of more than $1 billion per year, such as GSK’s anti-ulcer drug Zantac. But then product pipelines started to run dry, leading critics to question the industry’s ability to turn the wealth of data gleaned from the human genome sequence into successful drugs.

Mergers and in-licensing have given a short-term boost to pharmaceutical companies’ depleted pipelines, but Goodfellow believes that the only way to guarantee long-term productivity is heavy investment in new technology. After GSK was formed in 2000 from SmithKline Beecham’s merger with Glaxo Wellcome, Goodfellow was given the task of unblocking the pipeline by reducing the average “cycle time” from the identification of a drug target to the discovery of a promising compound.

Goodfellow’s labs in the US, UK, Spain and Japan have begun to harness genomic data to identify potential targets and genetics to predict patient response. His goal, he says, is to get ahead of the game by producing a complete library of molecules that target every key metabolic protein produced by the human genome, even before their potential role in disease has been identified. “If we can then engineer the properties of drugs and safety upfront into that collection of compounds then we won’t have that risk further on,” he says.

He has also introduced automation to increase the rate at which candidate molecules are synthesised and tested. Miniaturisation, for example, allows thousands of assays to be conducted simultaneously with the results read automatically by machine.

In the past five years, Goodfellow reckons the new technologies and practices he has put in place have reduced GSK’s cycle time by about a year. “We’re beginning to see that come through to the market, but it is going to be another one or two years before I can stand up in public and say, ‘success, we’ve done it’.”

Goodfellow also thinks the industry will benefit if more freedom is given to its lab scientists. One of the benefits of increased automation in R&D is to allow scientists more opportunity to use their brains, he says, rather than spending all day doing menial tasks like mixing substances in test tubes. But his worry is that young scientists are not being trained to think for themselves. As a result they are not always prepared for a career in industry. “Unfortunately, we are using a training system that was based on the medieval principle of apprenticeship. I’m against this craftsmanship type of approach. I think we should be emphasising more the creative rather than the dexterous, manual components of the training.”

Of course, overseeing a revolution in drug discovery from the lofty heights of management can make it harder to implement change in the day-to-day business of science. “As a manager you basically talk to other managers, who manage the people who do things,” he says. But throughout his career, 54-year-old Goodfellow has never stuck with convention – as his ponytail testifies – so lest he should lose touch with his research roots, this month he is going “back to the shop floor” as a junior technician for a week, growing cells and making membrane preparations.

“I know it’s slightly fake because I can escape any time I want to,” he admits. “But I want to see what it’s like. There’s also an element of showing them I can still do it.”

Aberdeen

“As the most northerly city in the UK we’re seen as a wee bit geographically challenged. But a lot of people, when they arrive – including myself – are very surprised to find such a vibrant, thriving, affluent city”

Andy Porter, Haptogen chief scientific officer and antibody engineer, University of Aberdeen

Built from locally quarried granite, Aberdeen has a reputation for toughness and grit. Thanks to its role since the 1970s as a base for oil and gas exploration and production in the North Sea, the UK’s most northerly city is also one of the most prosperous.

The Granite City hosts two universities – Robert Gordon University and the University of Aberdeen – and is internationally renowned for research in energy and renewables. In August last year the Department of Trade and Industry and the Scottish Executive announced £6 million of funding for a pilot offshore wind farm in the Moray Firth. If the five-year pilot is successful, a 200-turbine wind farm will be built and should generate enough electricity to supply the entire city.

Perhaps surprisingly, the city boasts Europe’s highest concentration of life scientists per head of population. For example, it is second only to Cambridge when it comes to antibody engineering, with four antibody engineering companies based here. One of these, Haptogen, is developing therapeutic antibodies that target the molecules bacteria use to communicate. Just before Christmas the University of Aberdeen spin-off signed a deal with a US biotech giant and a Korean pharmaceutical company (the details have yet to be announced) to take two of its products through clinical trials.

Another surprise is a small but growing electronics industry, including the start-up 4i2i, which in September last year won a contract with NASA worth £135,000. The company’s video coding technology will allow astronauts to beam DVD-quality images back from space.

In 2001, four departments at the University of Aberdeen were awarded the second-highest rating – five – in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE): plant and soil science; biological sciences; community-based medicine; and pure mathematics.

Dundee

“There’s mountaineering, hiking, kayaking, sailing. If you are an outdoors person like me this is a great place to be”

Spiro Rombotis, CEO Cyclacel

Electric street lighting, submarine telephone cables, hole-in-the-wall cash dispensers, keyhole surgery and marmalade all started life in Dundee. Continuing its tradition of discovery, the city is now the third biggest biotech cluster in the UK (after Cambridge and the region around Oxford) – up from seven companies to 40 in the past 10 years, 12 of them spin-offs from the University of Dundee. And unlike companies at other locations, not a single one has gone under during that time.

One of those spin-offs is Cyclacel, founded by Nobel laureate David Lane in 1997, which now has nine potential cancer drugs in the pipeline, three of them in clinical trials.

Biotech businesses are booming all over the city. In October, the Dundee branch of the US-owned company Upstate, which makes biotech reagents, expanded its premises in Dundee Technology Park. When the company came to the city in 1999 there was just one member of staff. There are now 77. Another Dundee company, Axis-Shield Diagnostics, is one of the top 20 biotechs in the world measured by sales.

The originator of many of these businesses, the University of Dundee, hosts two five-star departments – the highest RAE rating – in preclinical medicine and biological sciences, and four departments rated five, including civil engineering. Last year it opened the first forensic anthropology department in the UK.

The university’s prestige in biology is largely due to the Wellcome Trust Biocentre, which opened in 1997 and performs basic medical research. The centre will effectively double in size in July when a new building housing the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research opens for business, specialising in diabetes and tropical diseases.

Edinburgh

“You can take the excellence of the science base as read, but the city is also a wonderful place culturally. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Scottish National Orchestra are based here. We’ve got galleries and museums, the Edinburgh International Festival, a jazz festival, a film festival, a book festival, the military tattoo…”

John Archer, principal of Heriot-Watt University and chair of Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh

Edinburgh has every right to call itself the brainiest city in Europe – it has more graduates per head of population than any other European city. Its intellectual life and neoclassical Georgian architecture have earned it the nickname “the Athens of the north”.

Not surprisingly it has more universities than any other Scottish city: a grand total of four. The most science-oriented is Heriot-Watt, which has three departments rated five in the RAE – applied mathematics, statistics, and the built environment – and a five-star rated department of mineral and mining engineering. Last year, the University of Edinburgh ranked 10th in Europe and 47th in the world in a league table of research universities. It is home to two-thirds of the RAE five-star rated scientists in Scotland, has the largest informatics and computing school in Europe and is one of the UK’s top universities for life sciences.

Complementing this strong academic base are the technology parks and scientific institutions that have mushroomed across the city and its environs. In an effort to coordinate and market their activities internationally, the Edinburgh Science Triangle (EST) was created at the end of September 2004, bringing together seven of them.

The new grouping brings together unusual bedfellows, including the Roslin Institute, birthplace of Dolly the cloned sheep, and household names in electronics such as Motorola and Epson on the Alba Campus in the heart of Scotland’s Silicon Glen in Livingston, which is 30 minutes’ drive from the city centre. The Triangle also brings under one umbrella the pioneering work of the Institute for Stem Cell Research and the optoelectronics expertise of the Heriot-Watt Research Park.

Jim Wallace, Scotland’s enterprise minister, says the collaboration establishes “a critical mass of innovative and dynamic research expertise” that will create 15,000 skilled jobs and contribute around £750 million to the Scottish economy.

Glasgow

“It’s a great place to live. If you’d been here 10 years ago and came back now you would not recognise it. A lot of jobs have been coming in, including high-tech jobs, so there isn’t the same unemployment and depression there was”

David Jackson, University of Glasgow chemist and director of ScotCHEM

Sometimes referred to as the Dear Green Place, there are no fewer than 70 public parks and gardens in Glasgow. More than 2 million tourists visit every year, many using it as a base to explore the magnificent surrounding countryside.

But Glasgow is not just a pretty place, it is also well endowed academically, with three world-class universities: Glasgow, Strathclyde and Caledonian. The University of Glasgow has 11 science departments rated five in the RAE – more than any other Scottish university.

Chemistry at Glasgow is rated a respectable four, but with chemistry and physics departments closing or scaling back all over the UK, that might not have been enough to ensure its survival. But Scotland has a unique solution. In November the departments at Glasgow, Strathclyde, Edinburgh and St Andrews united as ScotCHEM. The idea is to capitalise on the strengths of particular departments rather than competing. They will share facilities and make joint bids for funding.

The future of physics at Glasgow and Strathclyde universities has also been buttressed with the creation of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance. The other SUPA departments are at Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, Paisley and St Andrews. Between them, ScotCHEM and SUPA will receive more than £37 million over the next four years in government and university funding.

The University of Glasgow also hosts the renowned Optoelectronics Research Group, and its psychology department is five-star rated. The Sackler Institute of Psychobiological Research opened last year, with state-of-the-art brain imaging and sleep research facilities at Southern General Hospital.