In December Celgene won approval for its second drug, Revlimid, the product of a 13-year quest to develop a version of thalidomide that would be as potent against cancer but would lack most of the old drug's side effects, such as nerve damage and fatigue.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has called upon Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen in his quest to find an alternative to the widely-used metrics of gross domestic product and gross national product.