TALK to anyone in the pharmaceutical industry—a private-equity investor, a drug executive, a scientist—and within three minutes Mr Pharma will start griping about the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The agency is incredibly powerful. Its judgment of a drug’s safety and efficacy is the single biggest “X Factor” in America’s enormous pharmaceutical market. In recent years, Mr Pharma will complain, the FDA’s approval process has become slower, its decisions more erratic. A few expletives will follow.
