Fortune wrote an article about innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, titled Big Pharma's New Prestige King. It's an interesting read, much more so than all the commentary on Wacko Jacko.

A mega-merger that worked. R&D that's paying off. While rivals like Merck and Pfizer suffer, Novartis has confounded drugmaking odds.

Drug executives won't soon forget the snakebit parade that started last fall when once-mighty Merck yanked its painkiller Vioxx off the market. Then the Food and Drug Administration rejected AstraZeneca's vaunted new blood thinner, Exanta. Soon after, Chiron's flu-vaccine business blew up due to contamination at the company's British plant. This spring Biogen Idec and Elan saw their multiple-sclerosis drug Tysabri linked to a potentially fatal brain disease. Pfizer, the world's No. 1 drugmaker, reiterated a warning that expiring patents would hurt sales and also withdrew its Vioxx- like painkiller Bextra from the market.

Amid the general gloom, the brightest ray of light has been Novartis. The Swiss firm has emerged as the leading contender for the crown Merck once wore as the industry's most prestigious company. Though it is pharma's fourth-largest player in revenues, Novartis has led the industry in FDA approvals of novel medicines over the past five years. It boasts one of the industry's strongest pipelines, with some 75 drugs in clinical trials. And in 2001 it launched the most effective cancer drug ever: Gleevec, the first fruit of research on an exciting new class of drugs called kinase inhibitors.

"Novartis has blown past Pfizer, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline" to become pharma's momentum leader, says Michael Muyot, president of Tracer Analytics, a New York City life-science consultant. (The firm measures momentum by tracking sales growth, breadth of product line, and other factors.) "It's firing on all eight cylinders."