Squatting between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the Vista International Hotel is a minor cultural monument of the 1980s. Elsewhere it would seem a standard modern luxury hotel—contrived public spaces (schooners in the Tall Ships Bar, sail sculptures on the mezzanine), penthouse pool, chrome chandeliers—but here, dwarfed by shimmering behemoths at the foot of Manhattan, it looks like a chunk of brushed aluminum wedged between the prongs of the world’s biggest tuning fork. Few of the hotel’s guests seem to notice. Overnight visitors to the Vista come to New York not for the city’s cultural and aesthetic smorgasbord, three miles uptown, but because, when it opened in 1982, the Vista was the first hotel in 155 years to be built near Wall Street. Less gaudy than the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City or Circus-Circus in Las Vegas, but equal to them in purpose, the Vista was constructed expressly so that guests can roll out of bed and be where the money is.

In the fall of 1989, the money on Wall Street was famously skittish, and first-time pilgrims to New York’s financial markets most often came away disappointed, making the Vista a kind of Heartbreak Hotel for entrepreneurs. The stock market, despite record highs, was still shaken and defensive two years after the crash of 1987. With a recession looming, investors had withdrawn to the safety of big companies with solid earnings. Worried about liquidity, they “lightened up,” especially on new companies. Such companies were too risky, it was said. They burned money. It could be years—decades—before they paid out, which by Wall Street’s myopic perspective was past the vanishing point. As with many collective judgments, Wall Street’s gloom was rapidly self-fulfilling. As investors retreated, stock prices sank, weakening the new companies and making their need for money all the more dire. The situation was widely considered a national tragedy by those who thought America’s future competitiveness was being squandered in Wall Street’s unwillingness to invest in emerging technologies. Of course, the same was said by the architects of the new companies themselves.

Yet still they came. On a warm morning in mid-October, the chief executive officers (CEOs) of more than forty new biomedical companies took their places behind several rows of long cloth-covered tables in the Vista’s ballroom, unhopefully partitioned for the event. Of all the emerging fields Wall Street was cool about, biomedicine was by far the most worrisome. It spent the most money, took the longest time to pay out, and even its successes like Genentech, whose hysterical debut on Wall Street nine years earlier had driven the company’s stock price from $35 to $86 in the first hour of trading, were wanting. The conference itself was an attempt to revive interest in the field. Throughout the morning, the CEOs each would have five minutes to introduce their businesses to an audience of about 150 presumed investors, although, as many of them already had discovered unhappily from perusing nametags around the coffee urn, there were few real investors present. Sellers outnumbered buyers at about the same rate, and with the same dissonant hopes, as girls do boys at an afterschool class in social dancing.

In such a market and with so little time at the podium, most of the speakers shed all pretense; it was impossible to be too bald here. Many had already filled out forms detailing their company’s most intimate financial needs that owed more to newspaper personal ads than Barron’s. “MARKET OPPORTUNITY:” flashed a California man’s slide, “Thrombosis—Leading Cause of Death in the Western World.”

Joshua Boger sat impassively through the morning session, silently rehearsing his speech. As founder, president, and chief scientific officer of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Boger’s titular weight exceeded most of the others’ on the program. But his plight was identical. Ten months earlier, he and a partner had launched Vertex with a coast-to-coast tour of venture capital companies, racking up 100,000 frequent flier miles in three months and raising just under $10 million. Vertex had no products, no revenues; it would be years, if ever, before the company would know if it even had something to sell. Yet it already was spending $75,000 a week even though its unfinished labs were crammed to the ceiling with unopened crates; even though, as the history of such companies showed, it would take up to a dozen years and more than $250 million to develop its first drug. None of this had discouraged Boger, who was thirty-eight, from coming to New York at a time when hundreds of decisions clamored for his attention back home. On the contrary, Vertex’s harrowing financial need was the sole reason for his making the trip.

Six feet five inches tall, Boger (pronounced with a hard g) was dressed in the uniform of the day—dark pinstriped suit, jacket buttoned below the sternum—though he appeared just rumpled enough to suggest that such clothing was neither his preference nor his habit. He was long boned though not ungraceful, sitting with his legs characteristically intertwined and his torso bent forward from the waist, like a dancer’s. Only his hands, which were large and torn at the cuticles, moved, thrumming a clean white pad on the table in front of him or twisting a ball-tipped marker. His face was a mask of serenity, a broad oval rising to a wide glimmering forehead and capped by thinning stick-straight brown hair that Boger parted anomalously on the right. Though he wore thick, rimless glasses and a beard that was not trim, it was not hard to imagine him as a ten-year-old—a caricature of a young scientist—grin, bones, and cowlick all askew.

Speaking just ahead of Boger was an irrepressible woman in her thirties who four years earlier had started a home delivery service for prescription drugs and whose candy-apple lipstick offset a cumulus of frosted hair. Her company, American Prescription, Inc., had grossed $185,000 in its first year, $900,000 in its second, and was now projecting sales of $70 million by 1993. “It’s been an absolutely incredible history as the company continues to ramp,” she gushed.

Boger, mindful of Vertex’s situation, ringingly agreed. “I hate,” he said, taking the podium, “to follow someone with sales.”

A chemist by training, Boger had come to selling solely as a requirement for doing science. But there was no mistaking, as he began to speak, that he seemed born equally to both tasks. He had grown up in a thriving, prosperous household in Concord, North Carolina, twenty miles northeast of Charlotte, a scion of the German and Scotch-Irish pioneers who had dominated the area since before the Revolutionary War and are known to be self-reliant, industrious, unemotional, opinionated, and cold, although, as North Carolina historian William Powell points out, loyal to family and friends. His English ancestors on his mother’s side, the Sneads, who descended the Piedmont by way of aristocratic Virginia, go back to the Domesday Book.

Correctly Southern, both the Bogers and Sneads have a history of carefully cultured, small-town respectability; both have long been prominent in their communities. Boger’s paternal great-grandfather, a farmer in Concord, was wounded four times in the Civil War, including once at Gettysburg; his grandmother was active in the Daughters of the Confederacy until her death in 1960. His father’s father, after serving as superintendent of the segregated Cabarrus County school system, took over the primitive Stonewall Jackson Manual Training and Industrial School in Concord and made it into a model reformatory, largely by preaching a stern progressivism and persuading mill owners from around the state to donate heavily for new buildings.

Boger’s father, Charlie, a tank commander in World War II, was self-employed as a yarn broker. Inheriting from his own father a genuine interest in people and a practiced Rotarian appreciation for knowing what others want and how to give it to them, Charlie Boger was an exceptional salesman. With the textile mills of the Piedmont expanding headlong in the years after World War II and the explosion of new synthetic fibers and dyes, mill operators were drawn into the briskest competition they had ever known. Boger, who had a degree in chemistry, often went to sleep at night studying chemistry texts, so that when he drove to the mills in Charlotte, Kannapolis, and Winston-Salem, occasionally with one of his four sons on the front seat next to him, he could explain exactly what chemical steps would be necessary to capture the fashion industry’s latest colors on any type of thread. Buyers were impressed, and Boger was popular, especially with the product men, who valued his expertise and the considerable work he saved them.

But Charlie Boger sold better than he managed. Thirty years later, Joshua would remember making customer calls with him during the summer and being shocked to find that he had signed flatrate annual contracts. The busier his father was, Boger realized, the higher the percentage of his labor that went to others. Petulantly, Joshua grew disdainful of people who allowed themselves to be exploited this way. Though the family lived comfortably, Mary Snead Boger, Joshua’s mother, never ceased to worry about money—a permanent cloud on an otherwise untroubled and equable horizon. “Charlie could sell you anything,” she would recall years after her husband’s death, “but he didn’t know bat brains about business.”

Shortly after Joshua was born, the family, riding the fullness and confidence of the postwar boom and the promising start of Charlie’s new business, moved from a duplex in the center of town to a large, custom-built Georgian Colonial on a newly subdivided dead end street on the outskirts of Concord. With two-story wooden columns grafted onto a brick facade, the house, eventually stuffed with a hefty flotilla of solid English reproduction furniture and 10,000 books, sat on a small rise, like a prow, facing a country club to which the Bogers belonged. It was nestled by a broad lawn dotted with magnolias and encircled by fields and pine woods with a stream that the boys could fish in—the complete New South idyll.

Boger grew up in the house in a whirl of boyish overachievement. He and his three brothers each excelled in school and in sports. Each was tall, thin, and high-spirited and had voluminous interests, making the household a kind of boisterous, high-expectation boarding school with Boger’s mother, an outspoken and dramatic woman, as headmistress. With her liberal encouragement—later to become an award-winning theatrical director, she once marshaled other women to block the razing of Concord’s antebellum courthouse by standing in front of a bulldozer—the boys relentlessly prodded themselves and each other. Together they became famous in town, the “Boger boys” being Concord’s answer to the precocious “whiz kids” of the 1950s and 1960s. When Joshua was ten, he had progressed so far in a year of piano lessons that his teacher pronounced him a prodigy and contacted the local newspaper. In an article picked up by the Associated Press, Boger explained that he practiced every morning at 6:30, before school, and had begun charging forty cents a week to teach his brother Ken, who was five years older. “I keep him behind me,” he said, “so I can keep up the lessons.”

Diligent at everything he tried—he handed in a 400-page paper on Africa in the fourth grade—Boger gravitated early to science. By age seven, he was spending hours, and sometimes days, in a laboratory that his father helped him build above the garage. It was a low-ceilinged barnlike space with unpainted rafters and plank floors—“more space per scientist than we have at Vertex,” he would joke—and it reflected the eclecticism of his world, a world that young Boger self-assuredly considered the world and thus strictly within his power to control. In one corner there would be a potassium permanganate crystal the size of a dinner plate suspended on a thread over a vat; elsewhere, a stack of microbiology plates, the result of a recent experiment in which he had swabbed the throats of the other kids in the neighborhood in order to compare the germ-killing potency of mouthwashes. There would be plants growing, animals in cages, rocks that Boger had chipped out and mounted on boards, chemistry experiments from a Time-Life project series that his father had ordered through the mail, a microscope with a fly impaled under its lens. Whatever order there was reflected the materials on hand and what Boger called his “dumbcat curiosity.” Other than the rows of shelves groaning with the family’s extra books, the space was his alone. His father might donate reagents—he once came home with twenty-five pounds of mercury, handing it over without a word—but neither of his parents ever visited.

As a young experimenter, Boger simply went his own way. Once, when he was eight, he spent a long Saturday shuttling between his lab and an open red-clay field next to the golf course. Knowing that water, Drano, and the tinfoil from a milk bottle produced hydrogen, he filled several balloons with the volatile gas. Heedless of the fate of the Hindenberg, he then ran a mouse through a maze he’d constructed, built a gondola to take the hapless animal aloft, and sent it soaring. When the mouse came down, Boger again subjected it to the maze to measure its disorientation. Being eight, he spent the next day playing baseball.

To Boger, science was the most natural way of apprehending a world that could otherwise be maddeningly obscure; he was enthralled with its precision and power. It was also fun, just as lying under twelve feet of water in the diving pool at the country club was fun. But science had its imperatives. In a school essay that he wrote at age thirteen in which he traced his academic career from kindergarten, which he recalled enjoying “except for rest time,” up to the eighth grade, he concluded purposefully, “Recently my interest in chemistry has turned me towards the field of medical research. My goal in life is . . . to help rid man of the burden of disease and hunger, and to help man get along with man.”

It was this trajectory, launched in puberty and accelerating more or less along the most favored path ever since, that brought Boger now to the speaker’s platform at the Vista. Valedictorian in high school, he went on to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he trained under the legendary Max Tishler, one of the most important and prolific figures in the history of drug research, and where he again finished first in his class. One of only eight students nationally to receive a full four-year National Science Foundation fellowship for graduate school, he then went to Harvard, which then as now had the best organic chemistry department in the world, where he got his Ph.D. He ultimately went to work for Merck and Company, the world’s premier drug firm. By his midthirties, an age when most chemists are still making compounds at the bench, he had become Merck’s senior director of basic chemistry. He held seventeen patents, although none for an approved drug, and was considered among those who knew the company best as a favorite eventually to head Merck’s vaunted $1 billion annual research effort—perhaps among the most powerful biomedical posts in the world. They were stunned—some furious, others relieved, even overjoyed—when Boger abruptly left the company in early 1989 to found Vertex.

Boger was never breathless as a public speaker, but he had trained himself, when talking to businesspeople, to be low-key and earnest. His years in the Northeast had purged all but the last traces of southernness from his voice, which remained sonorous and steady. Yet what set him apart now, as he described his company, was the strength of his pedigree. Everything in his past had led to his being a prince of the industry he now hoped to revolutionize, and it gave him a powerful mien. It was the aspect of the favored son, the smartest kid in the class, in the school, maybe in the school’s history. Even at the Vista, Joshua Boger had valedictorian written all over him.

Vertex, Boger said, was not only about to create powerful new drugs, but also to change the way all drugs would soon be created. With only five minutes to speak, he could hardly explain the scientific rationale for such a statement. He referred fleetingly to Vertex’s “unequaled scientific staff” and the “most impressive set of . . . technologies in the world.” Beyond that, he quickly summarized the company’s first project. It was an attempt to improve upon an experimental drug called FK-506 that suppressed the immune system. The drug had been shown to be highly toxic in some test animals, but it was still thought to have extraordinary potential in humans in facilitating organ transplants and curing autoimmune diseases.

“We will redesign the molecule,” Boger concluded matter-of-factly, “and eliminate its undesired properties.”

Afterward, Boger left the ballroom as soon as he could politely pull himself away. He had never expected much from this forum; Wall Street’s “promiscuous imagination,” as biotechnology writer Robert Teitleman called it, had long since grown impatient with stories like his, and the shortage of real investors at the Vista had proven that. But Boger knew something else. Vertex was in a historic position. The company was attempting something so bold that most people in the drug industry questioned whether it could be done at all. It would design drugs—not merely appropriate them from nature and tinker with them, as was the rule, but design them, atom by atom, as one designed a skyscraper or a computer.

As even Wall Street might have recognized, if Boger was right, the most consistently profitable legal industry in America during the past forty years (besides, perhaps, cigarettes) was on the verge of an upheaval in the way it went about discovering new products, an upheaval that would vastly increase the utility and variety of those products and the oceans of money that flowed from them. Over the next thirty years, Boger believed, drug research would become vastly more refined, more rational. Those who led the way would be heroes. Vertex, he knew, or some company like it, could well become the new Merck, which besides being a paragon of medical science had recently become, as measured by virtually every magazine executive poll, the most admired corporation in America. It was a prize of rare stature and importance.

And for that, Boger had decided, no task was too onerous, even putting himself out for as unpromising and unseemly a cavalcade as the one at the Vista.

“A meat market,” he described it later. “We’re talking fishnet stockings. I mean it just doesn’t get any lower than this.”