This month’s column was supposed to be guest-written by my editorial director. Unfortunately, he was attending a trade show in Paris in April and was trapped in the City of Light until shortly before press time, due to Europe’s post-volcano air-travel ban. Oh, and if any of the pages of this issue are printed upside-down, you can thank Eyjafjallajokull for that, too; our production manager received an unplanned week-long extension on her vacation to Italy.

I’ve yet to see any accounts of how the volcano in Iceland has impacted pharma operations, but I can report that a few European exhibitors at the Sourcing & Services section of Interphex were, um, exhibit-less until the second day of that event. I’m sure that attendance at the show took a hit from the absence of flights from Europe.

Which is to say, maybe globalization isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After all, this wasn’t a 2012-level catastrophe; we didn’t suffer the hundreds of thousands of deaths or nation-wide cataclysm that resulted from the 2004 tsunami or the Haiti earthquake. This was just smoke and ash, and yet it brought the world’s largest exporter to a standstill. As Daniel Gross wrote in Slate last month (http://bit.ly/aejGYx):

(Fortunately for Mr. Gross and his readers, Slate is a virtual magazine that has no print operations or distribution logistics to fret over.)

We talk a lot about the global supply chain in our industry, of course. Sure, there are issues with building redundancy among suppliers, but concern at this level tends to focus on the integrity of the product. To that end, I have to admit that I never considered a feature on “what to do when your samples can’t be transported because of a Europe-wide air-shutdown.” (If you’d like to pitch me an article along those lines, I’m all ears!)

Our Advanced Degrees columnist has detailed the problems with keeping temperature-sensitive drug product preserved in emerging regions, and we’ve run feature articles on the importance of certifying ingredients and providers, but I thought it was funny in last issue’s interview with Peter Soelkner of Vetter Pharma International, when he mentioned that the company’s German facilities have “no exposure to earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes.” Now I think they need to look into volcano-proof transport systems, too.

Last May in this space, as H1N1 was just rearing its head, I cited Plutarch’s celebration of the Roman god Boundary. That column mused about globalization in terms of benefits (increased trade and all it entails) vs. its down-sides (rapid spread of really nasty viruses, for one). The truth is, we’re all exposed. We ought to weigh thebenefits of globalization not just against its negatives but against our dependency on it. It’s not like there’s any going back, despite the fervent hopes of radicals (of all political stripes), so what we need to learn from this event is the paradoxical fragility and resilience of Life As We Know It.

In closing, I’d like to quote Jimmy Buffett – whom we should all quote more often than we do – in saying, “I don’t know where I’m gonna go when the volcano blows.”

(But I think there are a lot worse places to be stuck than Paris or Rome.)

Gil Y. Roth has been the editor of Contract Pharma since its debut in 1999. He can be reached at gil@rodpub.com.