Excerpt from Generation Rx by Greg Critser, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

To derail the new bill, Williams and Lerner turned to an unexpected source, a man named Gerry Mossinghoff. Tall, owlish, and charming in an old-school sort of way, Mossinghoff was the U.S. commissioner of patents and trademarks. As such, he was committed to traditional patent law, and barely an official phrase passed his lips without Mossinghoff uttering something about "classic, hornbook patent law," referring to the nineteenth-century case books that informed his views. He was also a textbook Reaganite, inclined to look unfavorably at regulatory or legislative limits on patent life. He had helped the president establish and populate a new, conservative patent court. Just who "requested" that he get involved and testify before Congress on the pro–brand name side is unclear, and there were recriminations all around. It was an unusual position for a paid public servant to be in.

But it was too late. Bill Haddad had made sure that the legislation would not get sabotaged by going directly to the congressman most likely to do so: Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. Socially and fiscally conservative, Hatch was a supporter of pharma, but he had a pronounced populist streak as well. He had a yearning to transcend his narrow reputation as a conservative firebrand. To exploit that, Haddad hired Hatch's longtime chief of staff, who had just gone into private practice as a lobbyist, to convince his old boss to come onboard. Here was a great opportunity to expand and broaden his image, and, as Hatch was told, "generics seemed to be the right thing to do" to boot. Hatch agreed. The Waxman bill became Hatch-Waxman — the order of the names reflecting not effort but clout — and was signed that fall.

The reaction in big pharma's executive suites was startlingly clear and everywhere evident. There was now a new reality in the business, and that new reality was fear — fear of not exploiting drugs fast enough and hard enough before generic competition eroded profits. And there was only one way to do that: get more new drugs approved faster and find new ways to milk them once they were approved.

To help ease the political way, the brand-name companies hired a new PMA president. His name was Gerry Mossinghoff. As Roche's Irv Lerner said, "He had all the tickets we could possibly want."

Copyright © 2005 by Greg Critser. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.