Patrick Dale McCray

Summary

Searle is a pharmaceutical company engaged in the discovery and development of innovative products for improving health and curing disease. After completing my formal education and a three-year period as an instructor of mathematics at North Park College in Chicago, I applied for a scientific programmer position at Searle. My job at Searle has gone through many changes, but has primarily been focused on the development and support of application software to meet the needs of the scientific activities within research and development. However, there have been periods when I was heavily involved with commercial applications, system software, and administration, and pretty much isolated from the scientific affairs of the company.

The basic process of developing a pharmaceutical is chemistry and biology. It begins with such basic questions as: should it or does it have any activity? Is it safe? Is it effective? The process focuses more heavily on biology, both human and animal. Large amounts of data have to be analyzed at every stage of the process. That's where programming of computers comes into play. We write a program to perform a particular statistical calculation. The statisticians, chemists, and biologists come to programmers, individuals with sufficient background in the sciences to understand the scientific problems and with suitable skills in mathematics and computer science to construct computer programs to solve them.

I consult with statisticians, chemists, and biologists on mathematical questions and on carrying out certain mathematical calculations.