Professor Emeritus Jack Pettigrew has argued for more than two decades that fruit bats are actually flying primates, distant relatives of monkeys, lemurs and us.

Results in Brief: Vertex, Varian, Watson, Chiron, Alcon, Eyetech, Elan, NicOx, MorphoSys, Actelion, AstraZeneca, Shire, GSK, Bristol-Myers Squibb, QLT, Millennium, Celgene, Invitrogen, InterMune, Charles River, Ranbaxy, Takeda, Sankyo, Daiichi, Solvay

A new environment for pharmaceutical companies is on the horizon and it will be the fittest who survive, predicts Ian Nisbet.

The nay-sayers who warned it would take 100 years to complete the Human Genome Project will have plenty to fret over about the latest proposal percolating at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

Those charged with hearing pitches from software vendors who want to sell wares to biotechnology companies don't like these words: 'enterprise-wide solution'. They don't want to hear the generic wonders of the 'solution' being pitched, they don't want to hear marketing buzzwords or that the software will revolutionise the pharmaceutical business. They won't believe that kind of approach and they will show the software vendor the door, perhaps within minutes, without an invitation back.