UK government must heed warns over big pharma investment

New ventures are lifeblood of life sciences, and Merck’s move to scrap its £1bn London research centre suggests mood hardening

Compare and contrast. Here is the opening line in the government’s response to news that US pharmaceutical company Merck is scrapping its £1bn research centre in King’s Cross in London because it thinks the UK is not an internationally competitive venue. Whistling cheerfully, the Department for Science, Technology and Innovation managed to claim: “The UK has become the most attractive place to invest in the world.”

And here is Sir John Bell, former regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford and all-round grand guru of life sciences in the UK. He told Radio 4 he had spoken to several chief executives of large pharmaceutical companies in the past six months “and they’re all in the same space, and that is, they’re not going to do any more investing in the UK”.