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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Philadelphia Inquirer
Byline: Thomas Ginsberg
Apr. 24--Sir Tom McKillop, the near-retired chief executive officer of AstraZeneca P.L.C., bounded into a room at the drugmaker's Wilmington complex and wasted no time lancing some dragons:
Drug safety advocates are sputtering "nonsense." Regulators are creating "imbalance" in risk-vs.-benefit decisions. Americans are catching "the European disease" of excess caution and may lose more business to Asia.
Minutes later, perhaps unsurprisingly, McKillop confided that one of his favorite books is On Aggression, by Nobel Prize-winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz, a pioneer of theories about why humans kill each other.
"Fascinating," the Scottish chemist-turned-CEO said in an interview.
Full of pique and passion, McKillop may need all the insights he can get. Putting off his plan to retire last month at 62, McKillop has agreed to stay for an indefinite period to shepherd his company -- if not the industry -- through one of its toughest patches in years.
Product failures, lawsuits and his own succession are issues hanging over his $21 billion British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant, whose U.S. operations are based on Concord Pike just north of Wilmington and scattered around the Philadelphia region, where it employs about 4,500 people....
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