Alexander Bieri: Roche exists to research and manufacture drugs and to market them globally. Our purpose has not changed in 125 years, although the company has reinvented itself time and again as it’s explored new technologies in search of solutions to unmet medical needs.

F. Hoffmann-La Roche & Co. was founded in Basel, Switzerland on 1 October 1896 by the Swiss entrepreneur Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche as the successor company to Hoffmann, Traub & Co. Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche had had experience of the devastation wrought by the 1892 cholera epidemic in Hamburg, Germany. This experience helped shape his belief that disease might be tackled on a large scale by the research and industrial manufacture of medicines based on standardised compounds. It was this objective to which he dedicated most of his working life; he was only 28 when he founded Hoffmann-La Roche.

The company of Roche is therefore unique because it was founded in response to a medical problem, although it did not possess either a product or a technology that specifically addressed that problem at the time of its founding. In fact, the predecessor company had been a manufacturer of soap and floor polish amongst other things.

Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche took that company and adapted it to serve completely new purposes, supported only by such funds as he could supply, backed up by the resources of some of his friends. He was not funded by a bank – indeed, it’s highly improbable that any bank would have funded him in the circumstances. This state of affairs offered him great independence, however, and it gave the new company freedom to venture into new technologies at a very early stage: molecular biology in the 1930s, for instance, with the development of the first process for the synthesis and industrial manufacture of vitamin C, or again, diagnostics in the 1960s.

One thing that was distinct about Roche was that it was capable of reinventing itself time again because it was not dependent on a particular technology. That remains true today: Roche evolves in response to unmet medical needs.

All companies have a life-cycle – a trajectory that commences, rises, and eventually declines. Growth via mergers & acquisitions can accelerate the lift of that trajectory, but it tends to be short-lived. Organic growth – growth via the sale of products and services that originate within a company itself – tends to be more stable and last longer. This is the case with Roche.

Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche lost control of the company when it was limited in 1919, and he was to die in the following year. Control was eventually regained by the Hoffmann-La Roche family after World War II, and this group is still the company’s largest shareholder of voting stock, with approximately 50% of the votes. The company was even the inspiration for a Hollywood film whose cast included Audrey Hepburn and Omar Sharif – the 1979 production Bloodline, based on a 1977 novel of the same name by Sidney Sheldon and centring on a fictional company called Roffe & Sons Pharmaceuticals.

To have survived for 125 years, and still to be tackling unsolved medical challenges, is a remarkable achievement, and one that should be clearly marked.

From 31 August to 3 September 1971, Roche held a symposium in Basel whose title was The Challenge of Life: Biomedical Progress and Human Values. To quote from the symposium proceedings:

“During the 75 years of Roche the research division has become by far the largest department in the company, with basic research assuming an increasingly important part in it. For this reason Roche cannot but feel a share of the responsibility towards the many problems raised by biomedical progress. Hence, the idea of celebrating the anniversary along conventional lines could not be seriously entertained. The occasion was to show Roche at work. A special kind of work certainly, breaking away from the daily routine into the sphere of free communication with thinking people outside the purview of the company’s usual tasks. Thus was born the idea of a multidisciplinary symposium with a subject which would throw open to discussion the scientific endeavours of the company in their relation to society – the human problems of biomedical progress.”

The Challenge of Life was a significant watershed in the life of the company: it challenged Roche itself and reset the company’s course for decades to come. Our 125th anniversary celebrations deliberately reference those of the 75th, and involve the commissioning of a unique suite of artworks not on the challenge of life but rather the cost of life. Created by the British artist Paddy Hartley, they explore the perceptions and experiences of patients today against the background of the scientific and medical developments of the past half-century.

Inspired by Roche’s belief that art needs to challenge people in order to be useful, this project is a core element in the ongoing dialogue between the public and science about the purpose and ethics of pharmaceutical research and manufacture.

The purpose of this exhibition is to demonstrate Roche’s willingness to reflect openly on its products, treatments and medicines by putting these topics up for discussion via an exhibition of original artworks. These topics include, for example, the prolongation of life, genetic engineering, the right to die, palliative care, research as a promise or threat to humanity, and body modification.

The main focus of the exhibition is on three aspects: the beginning of life, the end of life, and the challenge of adding life to years rather than years to life, which is fundamental to the philosophy of Roche as a pharmaceutical company.

By commissioning The Cost of Life, we further emphasise our continuing role as a significant patron of the arts. The Cost of Life project aims additionally to increase Roche’s reputation as a responsible partner to society and to intensify our connection to local and global communities interested in the arts, the sciences, and the relationships between them.

We were interested in commissioning original work from an artist who had a patient-centred view – and this description perfectly fits Paddy Hartley. There are many artists who are interested in the relationship between art and science, but Paddy’s interest goes much further than that. He’s interested in the experience of the patient, in the experience of pain, and he has a unique way of expressing this from a philosophical viewpoint. This patient-centred view and Paddy’s commitment to articulating ‘the patient’s plight’ aligns fully with Roche’s patient-centric philosophy.

We were aware, of course, of Project Façade, a landmark combining elements of surgical, social and military history that Paddy carried out at King’s College London in close collaboration with Dr Ian Thompson, Kings College London (KCL), Dr Andrew Bamji formerly Gillies Archive Curator, William Edwards Curator of the Gordon Museum (KCL) and Professor Malcolm Logan at the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics (KCL).

That project brought to the attention of an international audience the untold histories of First World War servicemen treated for the horrific facial injuries they had sustained in action. In The Cost of Life, Paddy widens his focus to cover three primary subject areas that concern how biomedical science influences society and the individual and cover the totality of the human lifespan, from birth to death. They are: embryology and the right to create life; the causes and consequences of age-related disease; and euthanasia and the right to facilitate elective end-of-life treatment.

Paddy has chosen to make predominant use of white porcelain paper clay for the collection, making additional use of metal, glass and fabric where appropriate. The artworks will vary in scale but will all be plinth-based. Their inspiration is drawn from the conversations Paddy has conducted over the course of 25 years with patients and medical professionals who have intimate experience of the three chosen themes.

These profound insights are augmented by Paddy’s own personal experiences. The artworks articulate his reflections on those conversations, and they also reference one another, so that the themes articulated in one work may appear in some other form in one or more of the other works. A suite of thought-provoking explorations with surprising outcomes, they imply a series of internal and external conversations and encourage the viewer to reflect on the intimate interrelations between life and death, health and illness, control and helplessness.

That’s a complex question, because there are so many parallels. Paddy is deeply interested in the body, and specifically how patients experience their bodies when they suffer illness or injury. As an entrepreneurial artist, Paddy has the resilience and the questioning mind that we value at Roche. His work derives from the questions he asks, just as our pharmaceutical products derive from the questions we ask.

As a ceramicist, Paddy experiments all the time and knows that some of these experiments will fail. Indeed, he needs some of those experiments to fail in order to create works that will succeed. As a pharmaceutical company, we’re in exactly the same position.

From an historical perspective, one could also add that the development of pharmaceutical science in Europe was greatly facilitated by the import of the Arab technology of producing ceramics. And from an ethical perspective, one could add that Paddy’s work has a very strong ethical framework, founded on a profound interest in what is good both for the individual and for society as a whole.

I hope that they will stimulate visitors to ask themselves questions about the relationship between the patient and medical science in the widest sense. It’s a relationship that is complex and challenging. By staging these two exhibitions, we are showing as a pharmaceutical company that we accept our history as it is and are honest and open about what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and what this can mean for individuals and for society as a whole.