Friday Biotech Funnies: Hitler's Peer Review Angst and Biotech's Id

Who says scientists don't have a sense of humor?

Check out this video on YouTube, in which Hitler's tirade scene from the 2004 film Downfall was hijacked by subtitles about the peer-review process through which scientific research is published in prestigious journals.

Wait, wait -- I know it sounds boring...but wait until Hitler starts pounding the desk and screaming "F@&king reviewer number three! It's always the third g-ddamn reviewer that screws us over! Not a single f@&king one of them has published a high-impact paper in the last five years..." (Hat-tip to Cynthia Robbins-Roth at BioWorld for finding this.)
Another funny biotech forward making the rounds these days is Biotech Blowup. It's a web site in which someone has taken the home pages of various biotech web sites and added banners saying the kinds of things people think but never say out loud -- sort of the "id" of biotech.

So there's The Medicines Co. (MDCO): "Forgetting to file a critical piece of IP that will cost shareholders billions of dollars -- priceless," a reference to the fact that the biotech missed a patent filing deadline for anticoagulant Angiomax (bivalirudin), which could wind up costing something like $850 million in sales and created a scuffle that recently escalated from lobbying efforts to lawsuits.

And there's Talecris (TLCR): "Bailing out private equity since 2007," a reference to the drug maker's massive $950 million initial public offering, which generated $350 million in cash and $864 million in equity for private equity firm Cerberus Partners, which was reeling from bad investments in Chrysler and GMAC.

Keep hitting the refresh button for more -- but note that some of them will repeat before you get to newer ones like Acadia Pharmaceuticals (ACAD): "Pimavanserin will work sooner or later -- the little voices in my head told me so." After a Phase III failure in Parkinson's disease psychosis, just keep telling yourself that...