Recently, I gave a keynote speech to a conference of the leaders of a global pharmaceutical company. My theme was the evolution of the industry and I reprised the Darwinian explanation for how and why our industry’s business models are speciating into distinct and differentiated models.

Afterwards, the questions were dominated, as usual, by practical questions about how the firm could accelerate its own evolution and I was able to give well-considered and pragmatic answers. Until, that is, the last question, which forced me to reflect carefully before answering. It was a very good question and elicited an answer that, I hope, will interest you.

The day before the conference, the US government had announced caps to the operating expenses of research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This was no minor announcement. The restriction to 15%, cut back from between 30% and 70% of research grants, will reduce spending by $4bn per annum. Many researchers, predictably, have howled in anger, but even usually restrained voices have used words like ‘apocalypse’ and ‘kneecapping’. It was with this in mind that my questioner, a senior research and development leader, asked me to predict the impact of the changes on the industry. And, interestingly, his wording of the question implied that the issue was overblown, that it still left the NIH spending a lot of money and that, somehow, the NIH and the life sciences research ecosystem would adapt. I paused for what seemed to me to be ages before I answered.

Academics joke that if you laid all the professors in the world head to toe in a long line then they probably still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. And, as I began my answer, I worried that I was confirming that aphorism. As usual, I fell back on evolutionary theory because it’s the best, most fundamental truth about how our industry works. “It’s become commonplace for us to talk about the pharmaceutical innovation ecosystem,” I began, “but often we use that word without considering what it really implies. Ecosystems include many species and the activities of each affect the others in very complex ways that are hard to predict.” I went on to remind the audience that the natural world is full of examples, from the 1930s Dust Bowl in the US to the collapse of the Grand Banks fisheries, where tampering with an ecosystem produced unintended, unwelcome outcomes.

As I spoke about ecosystems, I could sense both that the audience broadly agreed, but also that it was hungry for a direct answer to the question. You might be too, so here it is. One of the salient concepts in ecosystem thinking is the keystone species, one whose connections to the rest of the system means it is disproportionately important to the functioning of the ecosystem. While ecosystems can withstand the loss or diminution of some species, if a keystone species declines then the entire ecosystem may collapse. Textbook biological examples include Alaskan sea otters and grey wolves in Yellowstone National Park. It’s not difficult to displace this concept (to use Donald Schön’s phrase) to the pharmaceutical innovation ecosystem. We could lose one or more of the biggest pharma companies and the ecosystem would adapt. We already have adapted, largely, to the decline of internal early-stage research and its replacement by venture-funded start-ups, for example.

But the NIH holds a special position in the pharmaceutical innovation ecosystem, not only in the US, but also globally. The breadth and depth of its connections with the rest of the ecosystem is so extensive that it meets the definition of a keystone species better than any other entity. Arguably, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which are also facing radical change, are also keystone species. Like sea otters and grey wolves, changes to these entities will have wide and largely unpredictable implications.

So I answered my questioner a little more verbosely than I would have liked to because I was thinking as I spoke. The implications of these changes would be wide, but more importantly, they would be unpredictable and almost certainly not at all what we want. Ecosystems are by definition complex and, as the natural world shows, it’s very easy to cause them unintended harm or even to collapse. In fact, I said (closing my answer with a Niall Ferguson quote), ‘the law of intended consequences is the only real law of history’.