Is this the year for mega-mergers? Merck will buy Schering-Plough for $41 billion in cash and stock. Merck had perennially insisted it would never merge or acquire rivals. But evidently the appropriate size of the industry's largest firms is changing. Merck and Schering-Plough will have roughly $42 billion in annual revenues between them. That is approximately two-thirds as much as the revenues at Johnson & Johnson or the combination of Pfizer and Wyeth. “We are creating a strong, global healthcare leader built for sustainable growth and success,” said Richard Clark, Merck's CEO. He'll run the new company. “The combined company will benefit from a formidable research and development pipeline, a significantly broader portfolio of medicines and an expanded presence in key international markets, particularly in high-growth emerging markets." To pay for the deal, the firm will cut $3.5 billion in expenses. Here's a release.

In an unrelated story, Merck executive bonuses are in the news. The stock of the company dropped sharply in 2008. And the company fired almost 9,000 people even before the Schering--Plough deal. But Merck awarded a handful of senior executives $35 million anyway, says this Bnet article.

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Electronic data capture provider DSG will host a user group meeting on March 26th in Atlantic City, New Jersey. "We are very pleased to offer our customers the opportunity to meet and discuss the challenges they face when implementing EDC solutions for clinical trials,” said Tony Varano, the company's CEO. “It is imperative that we listen to our customers to ensure we deliver what they need and when they need it."

Google and Facebook are quietly maneuvering over the control of identity management and large numbers of personal online profiles, says this article in Slate. Both companies want to make "social networking" more portable. "The hope is that as Google and Facebook compete, we are fitfully making our way toward the benefits of portable social data, a sort of command center for our online self," writes Michael Agger.

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Professors at the University of California-Berkeley have written a white paper that attempts to clarify what "cloud computing" means and why it matters to the U.S. economy. "There are no fundamental obstacles to making a cloud-computing environment as secure as the vast majority of in-house IT environments, and that many of the obstacles can be overcome immediately," the authors say. One angle is that defenses against cyber attacks could be scaled up more quickly, changing both the economics and time lines of zombie-driven blackmail attempts by hackers in China or Russia. The authors have a blog about cloud computing.

A London newspaper has a more nuanced look at drug safety than would be possible in the scientifically illiterate U.S. media. Turns out the doses for cancer patients battling fungal infections were too low in some cases. The U.K. bureaucracy responsible is the National Patient Safety Agency. Some of their safety alerts strike an appealing balance, offering clinical details without being alarmist. This page describes the NPSA's approach.

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