In response to questions from Senators, the Library of Congress Legislative Reference Service provided a statement for Volume 10 of the hearings on the job corporate directors are supposed to do:

"Each director must exercise his unbiased judgment, influenced only by considerations of what is best for the corporation... Many courts have spoken of the rule as being that a director owes a loyalty that is undivided and an allegiance that is influenced in action by no consideration other than the corporation's welfare."

Ebert suggested last night that he could fill a different role as a "public" director of Squibb. "It's clear that drug companies have to be reformed," he said. "The question is whether this is a place where I can potentially be a useful citizen."

Ebert said he wanted to explain the possibilities of the "potential usefulness" when the students come to meet with him today. As examples of the way he has helped improve Squibb from within, he said that he has been part of an effort to re-focus the company's research programs. He has also given advice on which drugs the company should take off the market.

But Ebert said he had little influence on one of the issues most troubling to many of the students-the question of "generic" drugs versus brand-name drugs.

Generics are drugs sold under the official name describing their contents-for instance, penicillin. Most drug companies sell exactly the same drugs under their own trade name, usually at a much higher price.

One of Squibb's largest-selling items, for example, has the registered brand name Pentids (R). The same drug-sold under the generic name penicillin-costs less than 25 per cent as much.

Some medical students-who say they are concerned about the high cost of drugs to consumers-have asked medical schools to encourage the use of generics. One of the students who signed the letter to Ebert-Fred Fox '68-has also asked the Med School to require its professors to use generic names in lectures and other instruction to students.

Ebert said last night the generics question "is a far more complex one than as it is normally presented." Instead of simply attacking brand-name, drugs, he said, students should "see that the cost of drugs is the real problem."