Kenneth Frazier Quotes
We value R&D as a company. It's who we are.
Frazier, Kenneth. "Merck Presentation at the 35th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference." JPMorgan Chase & Co., 9 Jan. 2017.
Many of his greatest ideas were not sufficiently appreciated by many other scientists nor the businessmen who funded scientific projects then. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
Babbage anticipated the digital era when a small number of computer programmers develop a powerful program that can be used by millions of people who have no skill at programming.
Kenneth Carleton Frazier is an American business executive. He is the chairman and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. (known as MSD outside of North America). After joining Merck & Co. as general counsel, he directed the company's defense against litigation over the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx. Frazier is the first African American man to lead a major pharmaceutical company (part of the Fortune 500 companies). He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
