Is there a more wasteful federal program than NASA? Does it matter if a robot can land on some planet and take a picture of itself digging a small hole?

It’s clear that NASA is both useless and popular. Which is the opposite of the pharmaceutical industry: indispensible and unpopular. NASA gets it. NASA understands public relations. NASA can take an astronaut brushing her teeth in orbit and turn it into the eradication of polio.

For proof of this industry’s weakness in the same area, one need look no further than a recent dustup across the Atlantic. Outgoing Glaxo CEO Jean Pierre Garnier sat down with the BBC. He thought he was going to be talking about bird flu, pandemics, saving lives. It should have been a chance to showcase research that could save civilization.

Instead, the conversation veered out of control. Garnier, a pharmacologist, found himself in an audibly vexed mood. All the BBC reporter wanted to talk about was antidepressants. Garnier believed he had answered the reporter’s question. Depending on where you sit, you may think Garnier was dodging the question or exasperated at repeating himself.

Different Strokes

“I have answered the question three times,” Garnier said. “I am not going to answer it a fourth time.” He was just starting to simmer. The reporter persisted in talking about a GSK blockbuster, Paxil (seroxat), and access to data about other drugs. In the end, Garnier abruptly stalked off the radio interview, to the amusement of the hosts and the British media.

Any CEO should be able to keep a cool head in speaking with the BBC. Walking out in a huff creates the impression that there is something Glaxo doesn’t want to discuss. The genteel and deferential cocoon of attendants in which Mr. Garnier operates has left him ill-equipped to deal with one blunt question about data transparency asked over and over again.

Here’s one snippet from the interview. It’s Garnier’s response to why the company has not released more data. He’s already indicated that the documents were put online, and that outsiders were allowed to view the company’s files.

Said Garnier: “You have to be a little bit realistic here. There are millions of documents. Millions. We can’t possibly throw them in the street and say ‘please take a look.’ This has to be orchestrated. This has to be organized. The requests have to be specific. We have always been open minded about giving information that is required.”

A Verbal Tussle

There are several exchanges in which the BBC reporter, James Naughtie, and Garnier interrupt each other. At one point, the reporter mis-stated the executive’s middle name as Paul. “It’s ‘Pierre,’” Garnier says near the end.

The paradox is huge. Global companies doing complex research are on the defensive; NASA is a PR masterwork with a tangential scientific operation. The bureaucratic and compartmentalized structure of the life science company often make it appear flatfooted and secretive. Few individuals in such companies know enough to engage with the media in an authoritative, wide-ranging conversation.

What are the most common mistakes of the pharmaceutical industry in media interactions? Here are four.

Lack of practice. Cooking, bike riding, piano playing and most activities benefit from repetition. The life sciences assume that like lepers, news media representatives should be quarantined on some remote Pacific island. Shunning the press might be a viable strategy for the shoe industry or the roofing industry. It is not a viable strategy for pharma in 2008. But media-avoidance means that when crises arise, many executives from leading companies appear wooden and ill-at-ease.

Wrong tone. Executives who have condescending or imperial opinions about the news media should not be put in front of reporters in the first place. Such feelings will tend to leak out no matter how much coaching and training an executive may receive. Highly educated executives who are privately contemptuous of the press won’t “win” an encounter with a dim-bulb reporter. They will come off like Donald Rumsfeld.

Wrong timing. The industry’s protracted, paper-based analytical process to assess medical data means that it takes too long to generate a factual response. It routinely takes the industry weeks, months, even years to reply to its critics. All that time creates more suspicion and gives the media time to find articulate, smooth critics of the industry. The turnaround time for safety-related media inquiries should be 24 hours, though of course a more thorough response for regulators will take longer.

Wrong spokesman. If journalists are writing about sports, they talk to athletes. If they are writing about education, they talk to teachers. NASA, too, provides vast, deep access to everyone involved in one of its “science” projects.

Pharma has a different approach. Not providing scientists or doctors for pharmaceutical interviews will always be interpreted by the media as evasive and noncooperative. (The classic example of this is Pfizer’s refusal to participate in a Business Week story on Lipitor.) If scientific and medical facts are at issue, physicians and PhDs should be doing the talking. Like it or not, statements by nonscientists will be discounted or ignored by large media organizations.

Here, via YouTube, is the BBC audio of the Garnier interview, which we read about on the Seroxat Secrets blog. The recording is 9 minutes long, and the squabbling starts at the halfway mark.