Science crosses borders, but do pharma companies when searching for CEOs?

A widely-coined phrase is that science knows no borders: the effectiveness of medicines depends on a person’s biology rather than their geographic location or their cultural or linguistic ties; a compound does not care about the nationality of the person that discovered it; and an infectious disease pays no heed to lines on maps and political regimes.

So why should pharma, an industry so rooted in science, care about the origins of those finding and developing medicines, and those leading these teams? Surely all that matters is their ability to deliver the most effective and safe drugs to patients as expeditiously as possible? After all, the only issue that matters to a suffering patient is a drug’s ability to provide relief, improve quality of life or extend survival, not the nationality of the manufacturer’s chief executive.

But when viewed from another perspective, it is possible to see why pharma companies have not always ignored the issue of nationality when choosing their leaders.