In 1992 we decided to move from Toronto to Chicago. After 12 years at Litton, this was a major change in my career. After taking a few months to settle in Chicago, I turned to job searching. I found an ad for a consulting position at Abbott Labs headquarters in north Chicago, and easily landed that temporary position.
Turned out that one Abbott division was trying to move from legacy mainframe computing to HP Unix-based systems to save money. After a few months working at Abbott, they offered to make me full-time and I accepted.
The division I worked for was called Clinical Services, and was responsible for gathering, analyzing and reporting on all the clinical trials data for new pharmaceutical products. Of course, my role was as an HP Unix expert, figuring out the hardware, software and design best suited to meet the division processing requirements. The work was interesting, and looked to be a 3-year project to get all the users and applications moved to Unix.
The Abbot Park location was beautiful, very much like a university campus, with multiple buildings in a large park-like setting. Many of the people I interacted with also reminded me of a university environment, since they were PhD medical researchers.
Working at Abbott gave me a deep insight into the trials and tribulations of pharmaceutical research. Although these companies charge what seems like crazy prices for new drugs, and they do make huge profits, then also take huge risks. A small anecdote that made me more sympathetic to this: There was a research scientist that I became friendly with. I’d pass his office a couple of times a week and often stop for a brief chat. He was always at his computer with all sorts of molecular models displayed. One day as I passed I saw him sitting in front of a blank screen. I asked why and he told me that after 5 years researching a promising new drug, he had just proven it to be ineffective! His last 5 years was for nothing, as he said “I’m back to the drawing board.”
I was also blown away by the requirement to print literally 3-5 CARTONS of paper reports about each drug trial — and the FDA required 3 copies, so that could be up to 15 cartons! I had to set up a room with multiple high-speed printers and design a method to organize the print queues to optimize print times while keeping reports organized.
I was two years into this 3-year project when I was spirited away by a local headhunter that I knew. We had already showed solid success by moving more than half of the users and applications to Unix, with the costs being less that a single year of support costs on the mainframe. Moreover, turn around times were faster, so everyone was happy. This headhunter described a new venture within a large company that desperately needed HP Unix expertise, and I had the perfect reputation. The company was Mercer, described in a separate post.
