The billion-dollar molecule

by Barry Werth

The Billion-Dollar Molecule raises the curtain on the fascinating and tumultuous drama of a radically new start-up pharmaceutical company. That company, Vertex, is trying to design a lifesaving new drug that - if it works - will prove the potential of a brand-new drug-making technique and also fulfill the vision of Vertex's founder and chairman, Joshua Boger, one of the most promising scientists of his generation. In early 1989 the thirty-seven-year-old Boger set out to revolutionize the drug industry, the most profitable industry in existence. Trained at Harvard and at Merck, the premier biomedical firm and perennially most admired corporation in America, Boger established Vertex to design drugs atom by atom. Barry Werth takes readers inside Vertex from its first days to profile the driven, obsessive scientists who work around the clock in pursuit of scientific breakthroughs. One member of Vertex's scientific advisory board, Stuart Schreiber, is a full professor at Harvard, younger ev