He also had to oversee a disappointing set of results for Marimastat, the anti-cancer drug which represents British Biotech's remaining hope of becoming profitable in the medium-term.Dr Goldstein is not daunted by the enormity of the task. Dr McCullagh was replaced seven months ago by Elliot Goldstein, from the pharmaceutical group SmithKline Beecham.The 48-year-old Canadian has the unenviable task of resurrecting a company now on its knees.Dr Goldstein was forced to scrap one of British Biotech's star drugs, the anti-pancreatitis treatment Zacutex, after a series of inconclusive trials. The chairman, John Raisman, retired and the chairman of the building material group RMC, Christopher Hampson, took his place. Its foundations were of sand - little more than the overblown hopes of investors, and more particularly, British Biotech's management. The public row set off legal action against Dr Millar, an inquiry by the London and New York stock exchanges, and even a probe by the House of Commons."Millargate" also caused a collapse in the company's share price, and plunged the sector into a crisis from which it has still to recover.A boardroom clear out was inevitable Biotech's "success", it appeared, had been largely fantasy. Disaster struck shortly afterwards.Last year, the company sacked its head of research, Andrew Millar, after he broke the secrecy of some clinical trials and voiced his concerns over British Biotech's drugs to shareholders.

Its chief executive, Keith McCullagh, in a fit of grandeur he later came to regret, said his company would be the "new Glaxo" - an all- encompassing pharmaceutical giant able to discover, produce and sell its own drugs. By the mid 1990s, it had outgrown these small beginnings to become the flagship of the burgeoning biotech sector. In other respects, however, British Biotech is but a pale shadow of its former self, its share price shot to bits, its founders and driving spirits sacked or gone, and its products of questionable if any value. What went wrong and what hope now for this one time wonder stock?British Biotech started in the late Eighties in an old warehouse as a loss-making drug research company. The remnants of this grandiose strategy are still there to be seen in the shape of Biotech's spanking new, modernistic, glass fronted headquarters on the outskirts of Oxford. Armed with a portfolio of chemical compounds which management hinted might have blockbuster potential in the treatment of cancer and pancreatitis, the company was able to raise hundreds of millions of pounds from investors to fund ambitious expansion plans into a fully fledged international pharmaceuticals company. At its peak, British Biotech, once the great white hope of the UK life sciences industry, had a stock market value of more than Railtrack.

It is also the story of those left behind to sort out the mess. THIS IS a story about hubris on a grand scale. We have to work in a much wider field than just within our industry.. One thing clearly brought home to me was that we couldn't get this done on our own.We spent a lot of time last year working with the No 10 Policy Unit, saying that we needed to make products much more simple, rather than making advice available.The insurance industry can only do so much, and it's important that these products come in a basket of welfare products. This doesn't guarantee that pensions are going to perform well, but that they meet cost parameters and that you are not going to be penalised. We've been keen on the Cost, Access and Term benchmark, where the Government has set the standards which financial products need. Products have to be capable of being bought over the telephone or via the Internet.We found people didn't like penalties for stopping and starting contributions It needed to be as basic as a bank account.

When you tried to explain to them that it was uncomplicated, they were able to counter it with lots of points.What came through loud and clear was that you have to have a product that caters for life today. It was only when I came to Direct Line and we launched a pension in January 1998 that I began to think differently.That research period was the first time I had the opportunity to attend groups and see people in the mass market who were totally and utterly confused about pensions They just didn't have a clue. Most customers were solicitors or accountants, and we were saying: "You have got to have advice to deal with pensions." We really insisted on the fact that this was extremely important.At Scottish Widows our big experience when we were providing advice by telephone was that people were not so much looking for advice, but help We needed a much more basic approach. One of the reasons why it didn't dawn on me that we needed to take a different attitude was that Equitable Life always had quite a simple product in a market where people were financially aware. As a sales and marketing manager, I firmly believed the mass market could be tackled in exactly the same way.