Perhaps There Are Better Ways to Spend the Money

It's not just financial firms that are being looked at askance over the pay of executives and board members -- biotech companies are also feeling the heat, reports the Wall Street Journal. An article in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology analyzed the salaries of 51 UK biotech companies, finding the average compensation for a chief executive to be £297,947 (US$493,616), and noting that higher pay didn't necessarily track with better performance. "There are quite a number of companies paying really quite substantial sums to CEOs and board members when they have very poor prospects. It cannot be helpful for the companies to have people draining cash out of them in this way," says study author William Bains from the University of Cambridge.