As an undergrad I worked for Dow Chemical and I met a M.D./Ph.D. who used to be a professor at UT Southwestern, but then switched to work for Dow Chemical. He had a collaboration with Memorial Sloan-Kettering on his project. He seemed to enjoy the combination of seemingly endless resources of Dow Chemical with the basic science driven research provided by Cornell. After some time in academics, he felt industry was a better fit. The pay is better, but the job security is not as good in that as you get older you can get phased out (fired) if you are not productive. Here are my own observations about industry vs. academics. I only have experience with the larger companies and I have not worked for a smaller biotech firm.
1) The pay is better in industry and the benefits are better (i.e. stock options, 401K in industry vs a 403B in academics, health insurance)
2) Projects in both industry tend to be more applied (i.e. often focused on therapeutics) whereas academics is more basic science oriented.
3) In industry, there are groups of people working on a project and you can switch projects relatively often whereas in academics the work is done by smaller groups of people.
4) The currency of productivity in academics is measured by publications, wherease in industry it tends to be patents (to protect their intellectual property often the legal department removes a lot of stuff from papers published by industry)
5) I have not observed anyone in the pharmaceutical industries see patients; however I have seen MD/PhD's act as a liaision between the academic physicians running the trials and the basic scientists in the company.
In the past academics have somewhat frowned on students (MD/PhD or PhD), but today with smaller companies and greater collaborations between industry and academics, this view is changing. One MD/PhD who works for a pharmaceutical company said his boss said "Why would you want to make toothpaste all your life?" after he said he was going to do an industrial post-doc.
Many in my lab have gone to industry (Lilly, Lexicon Genetics) and they are very happy because industry seems to protect their family time (i.e. you are encouraged to complete experiments during the workday and not work alone at night due to potential occupational hazards). I would just ask some of the upper level students/post-docs at your school what their impression is.
