Germany is Europe's largest pharmaceutical market for foreign companies, but the health care environment there is not attractive to these companies. Karl Gerhard Seifert, Hoechst board member responsible for the group's pharmaceutical division, said at a pharmaceuticals group press conference in Frankfurt that the drug industry needs a relatively predictable and stable framework in order to work on R&D, but in Germany there is no consensus on new technologies. He said that progress tends to be seen as a risk rather than as an opportunity which leads to a tangle of regulations. "This not only inhibits investment but also encourages young and promising scientists to seek a better environment and greater career opportunities elsewhere," he said.
The impact of legislation passed in Germany, and the need for a more positive attitude towards technology, do not reward R&D work in the country, Dr Seifert said, adding: "it makes little sense for economics and research ministers to lament the decline in the number of patents while their colleagues in charge of social policy are doing everything they can to devalue pharmaceutical patents by imposing reference prices."
In 1992, Hoechst Pharma recruited 54 scientists, in 1993 the figure fell to 34 and this year Dr Seifert says it will fall again to around 12, an indication, he believes, of how Germany is well down the path of scaring off "one of the few competitive and future-oriented high-tech sectors still left in Germany."
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