The formal signing of a business agreement is a paradoxical event. Like a wedding, it marks the end of the breathless seduction that spawned it and the start of the frank, purposeful relationship that is supposed to follow. In Judaism, couples are traditionally wed under an arborlike chupah, a metaphorical house, which shelters them momentarily from these and other contradictions. On October 3, 1990, a day in which a sudden north wind ushered fall into Massachusetts like a bugle blast, Vertex became such a house, or, rather, a stage set of one.

Boger had prepared for the day to be a circus. By the end of it he would rachet his assessment to “Felliniesque.”

Photographs of Mount Fuji in all four seasons, a prenuptial gift from Chugai, lined the walls in the conference room, and an architect’s rendering of a new four-story, postmodern company headquarters—the third, and most recent, proposal for new labs to have fallen through—hung impressively in the lobby. In the lunchroom, several graffiti-laced New Yorker cartoons and two dated Merck I.D. pictures of Boger and Navia that had been taped on the refrigerator were replaced with NASA decals commemorating shuttle launches that had borne Navia’s experiments—so far all unsuccessful—into space.

Boger had spent most of the previous day’s staff meeting issuing last-minute directions. On props, he said: “Absolutely every instrument should be on. If it’s got a display, make it do something—in color preferably”; on staging, “I want all the Putnam people [those working in the new Putnam Avenue labs] here for the morning. It’ll make things look more exciting”; on costumes, “Be reasonably accurate; don’t go out and buy a new suit, but if you wake up tomorrow and you have a choice to reach for the grungy pants you usually come to work in and the nice ones you sometimes wear, pick the ones you sometimes wear.”

Boger himself arrived that morning looking as if he’d just stepped from the shower, sartorially correct in his dark blue “power money suit,” monogrammed shirt, and paisley tie, his hair and beard neatly trimmed and combed. Leading Chugai’s uniformly black-suited delegation on a tour of the labs, taller than each of them by a foot, he stood out like a giraffe among pandas. He beamed cleverly, refreshed by the view.

Chugai was paying for Vertex’s scientists and science, but the laboratories were an indication of the company’s wealth and breeding—a secondary asset, like a trousseau—and Boger liked to show them off to advantage. He steered the Chugai men briskly through the wet labs, past the X-ray and protein facilities, and finally and inevitably into the darkened modeling room, where they crowded around a workstation at which Navia demonstrated how molecules bind. On the screen, stick diagrams of hundreds of connected atoms in brilliant reds, purples, and blues rotated gently, like hair-thin Tinkertoys, in a fathomless black sea. Navia handed around 3-D glasses, which all but Boger accepted and which thrust them, at the push of a button, inside the molecular cosmos.

“I’m afraid I need translation,” said Sam Nagayama, Chugai’s young deputy president, adjusting his glasses. Navia rubbed his fists back and forth, mimicking the interdigitation of atoms as they talk to each other.

“These simulation show identical thing that happens in body?” Nagayama asked, to which Navia protested gently that they weren’t simulations but “experiments.”

“It’s all Greek to me,” Nagayama smiled, adding brightly, “You make me feel like a fool.”

As hosts, Boger and Aldrich had taken exceptional care to satisfy the needs of their guests, to make them feel, despite Vertex’s boasting, that the agreement was equitable and that Chugai was getting as good as it gave. Had Nagayama’s remark seemed less admiring or more than a too literal translation, they might have been concerned, but he seemed to imply no unpleasantness. The night before, repaying the ritual feasts Boger and the others had politely endured in Tokyo, Vertex had held a banquet at the plush Four Seasons Hotel, across from Boston’s famed Public Gardens. It had consisted entirely of New England cuisine—roast quail, shelled lobster, medallions of sweet potato, pumpkin soup in whole pumpkins—and though not as inflationary as the $1000-a-head dinners provided by Chugai in Tokyo (where, as Boger observed, a whole melon “with a stem and a leaf” cost $140), the Chugai group was impressed nonetheless. Now, as they swept into the conference room for the formal signing, Nagayama looked like a man every bit confident that he’d made the right purchase, even if he didn’t entirely understand what he’d bought.

The signing was Chugai’s idea. “The Japanese like ceremonies,” Boger told the staff, “so we’re having a ceremony.” Boger had planned for it to be low-key and private: signatures, a champagne toast, just the principals and the photographers from their respective public relations firms. However, just as it was about to start, Kinsella, who’d flown east to New York instead of Boston so he could engineer an invitation from Schmidt to finish the trip aboard Schmidt’s private Gulfstream, burst in and stood beside Boger. Privately, he was angry at Boger about the loss of Schreiber, whom he saw as a hugely bankable asset and whose name he hated to see dropped from the marquee of his most promising company, and Boger might have wondered if the interruption wasn’t hostile had he not known that Kinsella found such moments irresistible. Leaving right after the pictures were snapped, Kinsella marched into the lunchroom, buttonholed a reporter, leaned into him like a figurehead on a victory ship, and instantly began promoting one of his latest business ideas: the first privately owned potato chip factory in non-Communist Poland. As ever, he was on to the next thing.

In that, Kinsella and Boger had always been same. Kinsella made his money and his reputation hatching new companies and staying with them only until they went public and he could sell his founder’s stock at a windfall. He liked to put things together and walk away. But Boger had no other temptations or affections. For him, the Chugai deal was leverage for one thing and one thing only: Vertex’s future. In a value-added world, a deal’s ultimate measure was not the money, but the larger catch it could induce. Thirty million dollars was barely one-seventh of what Vertex might need to make a drug. But the increased financial security it represented had probably doubled the company’s value overnight. Anticipating the day, presumably still years in the future, when Vertex would sell shares beyond its current limited circle of investors, Boger had never stopped trying to inflate Vertex’s worth or play to potential buyers. As always, his next thing was to bring in money, much more money, enough money to continue to, as Aldrich said, “feed the beast.” More than anything, the deal gave Boger his first significant opportunity to sell Vertex’s story to a wider audience, an opportunity he intended to flog at the day’s next and featured event, a press conference.

What Boger had been telling other drug companies and small, indifferent groups of investors like those at the Vista, he could now tell readers of the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Boston Globe, Scrip, and the four or five other journals that had survived the blandishments of Vertex’s PR firm and sent reporters anyway. Like all journalists, they had seen too many staged new events and press conferences to look more than congenitally bored as they tried to jumpstart themselves with coffee and backgrounders. Boger was confident he could win them, as he had won others, with his story. But first he had to yield to Nagayama, who had his own story to tell and had earned, as a paying guest, the right to tell it first.

“Chugai,” Nagayama said (pronouncing it chu-GAI), standing at a lectern borrowed from the nearby Hyatt Regency Hotel, “recently decided to make investment in very interesting company called Vertex. We have been very impressed with very rational approach to designing drugs.” He was stating the obvious, and the reporters understandably found little in his remarks to copy down, much less write about. And yet Nagayama’s story, like Boger’s, brimmed with subtexts, subtexts that gave away not only much about the company’s ambitions and motives but about Japan’s.

Like most industries just prior to becoming part of Japan’s export juggernaut, its leading drug companies—Chugai included—were now all stagnating, all for the same reason: They had succeeded too well at home. They had grown up in an overheated domestic market that, by American standards, was almost unimaginably forgiving. Unlike in the United States, for instance, doctors in Japan are allowed to own pharmacies. More than 60 percent of total drug sales are from medications that doctors prescribe, then sell to their patients at prices set by the government. Breathtaking in its potential abuses, this system has had two overarching results: Japan’s people take more prescription drugs and live longer than anyone else on earth. Yet now, as Japan was getting older, it was also saturated with drugmakers and drugs, and the government, under pressure to bring down rising health costs, had begun by slashing prices.

The shrinking Japanese market was the main reason behind Chugai’s global expansion and its interest in Vertex. It had spurred a blistering new competition among Japanese drugmakers that had forced them to revert to a traditional strategy, borrowed from the Chinese, of forming alliances with remote partners in order to defeat those nearest to them. Americans tend to think of Japanese companies as, paradoxically, both xenophobic and having their sights set irreducibly on worldwide dominion. Yet the simpler fact often is that they are scraping to protect slender market shares at home. This was what Nagayama had flown halfway around the world to say. The journalists seemed notably uninterested. They barely reacted, even when he injected a note of internationalism. “We don’t see any longer the borders in business and science,” he said. “Our major mission is to help patients suffering around the world.”

If the reporters were underwhelmed by a Japanese businessman telling them he was appropriating some of America’s most advanced technology in order to beat up other Japanese companies that would soon, if they hadn’t already, be doing the same, and that he dismissed the protectionist angst then gathering in the United States, Aldrich was stricken. The one thing he and Boger feared all along in doing a deal with Chugai was anti-Japanese backlash. Like Nagayama, they also saw the transfer of biomedical innovation between the United States and Japan as inevitable and, in its likely result of generating more new drugs, desirable. Nevertheless, they had been extremely careful about structuring those parts of the deal involving Chugai’s access to Vertex’s technology. Chugai had wanted, for instance, to send three of its best young scientists to train at Vertex for a year; Boger refused. The contract allows for frequent visitation but no outright siting of trainees. The first visiting researchers wouldn’t arrive for more than a month, but Boger had already begun security measures to restrict their presence. Gazing at the uncomprehending faces of the reporters, Aldrich drew a sigh of relief.

Free of the need for damage control, Boger now took the podium. Chugai deal or none, his objective as always was to position Vertex as the forerunner of the coming revolution in drug research. For lay audiences, this usually meant starting with a discussion of microbial screening and scrolling logically, inexorably ahead.

“There’s nothing wrong with screening if it works,” he told the reporters. “But it rarely works. It’s trial and error. And when it fails it’s a very frustrating process because you can’t do anything about it. We’re not happy with statistically successful probabilities. We want to solve problems. We don’t want to set up ten screening programs and hope that one of them pays out.”

He went on: “We like to go into projects where we’re very sure of the biochemistry. We believe we have that with FK-506. But FK-506 is very difficult to change chemically. The optimum drug is one that fits into a receptor with very little to spare, but you can’t engineer the bad parts of the molecule out by simply knowing the structure of the drug molecule. You need both parts of the picture. You need to see every atom.”

Boger’s last slide was one he had made just for the occasion. It showed comparative time lines for drug development. On top—the traditional approach—was a colored bar extending four to six years, the time it generally takes to begin testing a promising molecule in people. Nearly half the bar was titled “Discovery.” On the bottom was Vertex’s approach: “Discovery” was cut by about a third, shortening the entire bar.

“The question is,” he said, “What does that get us? Since if there’s no payoff on the bottom line, there’s no reason to do this. It gets us this: We’re in control of the process. It’s an information-based process, not a random process. It means we can get drugs faster to market and that they’ll be better drugs.”

The reporters, who hadn’t heard such a story before, perked up.

“Will you be manufacturing a drug or will Chugai?” one asked.

“We haven’t decided yet. The deal calls for a straight fifty-fifty share of the responsibilities and rewards.”

“How will you divide the project?”

“We’re working together.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“The discovery will be done here. But that doesn’t mean Chugai won’t have a role to play. This isn’t press-a-button-and-get-a-drug-out. It’s an interactive process.”

One appealing—and forgiving—aspect of representing a research-based company in public is the presumption of secrecy. Boger didn’t mention the nagging questions about the biological relevance of FKBP or the difficulties in solving its structure, nor was he obliged to. He didn’t explain that no small company could screen as effectively as a large one and that Vertex’s novel approach was not only a matter of choice but of survival. Speaking with the press, he could maintain as pristine and uncomplicated a version of Vertex’s story as the one he presented at the Vista, almost a year earlier, when the company had no science to contradict it. In that respect, he performed impeccably. The reporters were satisfied. Unlike many such sessions, this one gave them something to write about.

Business done, Boger now led the assemblage to the nearby Hyatt for an outdoor lunch and reception. For most, it meant trudging across the weed-choked rail yard and down an alley that runs between two warehouses-cum-laboratories before spilling into an industrial backstreet a block from the Charles River. Sparing the Japanese and the board members, Boger sent them ahead in cars. The Hyatt, at a point just above where the Charles widens into an artificial basin broad enough for sailing, is a hollowed-out, fifteen-story brick and glass pyramid crowned by a revolving bar. With splendid views of the looping river and of downtown Boston, it is an essential stop on the recruitment tours not only of Vertex but of many other Cambridge companies and the universities as well. What the X-rated Combat Zone once was to conventioneers, the Hyatt is to researchers visiting the new Cambridge: a site of multiple seductions. Boger had worked his wiles there often.

In a private courtyard, a banquet table groaned with posh food—medallions of beef, scallops wrapped in smoked salmon, tortellini Alfredo, melted brie, an antelope dish. Waiters floated by with champagne glasses on silver trays. A bar was set up in a gazebo, though the scientists, not knowing whether they were supposed to get drunk or return to work, abstained at first. It was chilly. Small knots of people warmed themselves in the sunny corners of the yard or huddled in their jackets around cocktail tables, mingling like dancers during a break.

The signing and press conference had been restricted, but now they were all here: Boger and Nagayama, receiving congratulations and trading confidences; Aldrich, finally unprepossessed, and Dr. Hiroyuki Ohta, Chugai’s chief of U.S. operations, sharp-eyed seconds and now, in a way, brothers-in-law; Schmidt, the rich, back-slapping uncle, and his limo driver, waiting to shepherd him out early and back to the moneyed canyons of New York; Kinsella, the eternal bachelor, effervescing about his next conquest (using bee pollen to deliver drugs to the lungs); the SAB (though not Schreiber and Karplus, who were explicitly barred); the other board members; Chugai’s research sachems; the press; the scientists. Seventy or eighty people in all. Only Thomson, in Faustian protest over what he considered a violation of the purity of science, stayed away. “I called over and told him that nobody wants him anyway, but he still didn’t come,” said Laura Engle, whom Thomson, emerging from his isolation, had quietly begun dating.

In an atmosphere so warmly suffused with self-congratulation, the talk was uniformly bright and confident. There were no expressions of misgiving, though perhaps, as Thomson’s absence suggested, there might have been. The marriage of biomedicine and money brought together, as the assemblage showed, a bizarre assortment of bedfellows. It was not hard to imagine the discomfort that a George Merck—much less a Max Tishler—might have found here. Or the kind of sharks, attracted by the opportunities for wealth and glory, that were now circling in nearby waters. There were compromises—great compromises—inherent in this mix, and they were now made stranger and more glaring with inclusion of the Japanese.

“I told these boys to go over to Japan and bring home the bacon,” said Frank Bonsal, a venture capitalist and board member from Maryland, elbowing his way into a conversation between Nagayama and Boger’s brother Ken.

“Bacon?” Nagayama said.

“Money.”

Just as Boger had foreseen that before Vertex could do any real science it had to have a story, he had also known that before the company made a drug it must make a deal. Now he had such a deal and was already looking beyond it to the next stage. Part of that—the easiest part—was widening his audience, which was helped considerably by the next day’s Wall Street Journal. “The agreement promises to catapult Vertex, a closely held start-up company formed last year, into a leading role among companies employing ‘rational drug design’ to develop new medicines,” the paper wrote. As Boger knew, being anointed by the world’s leading business journal as a leader in innovation, even if it had no way to measure or support such a claim, was tantamount to leading in fact. In business, perception leads reality, and Vertex was now beginning to be perceived—to the extent that it was known at all—as the best company in its class, just, of course, as Boger had always said and believed. It was a major coup for so young a firm.

And yet it also pointed up a larger stress, one that even Boger, to use his own term, couldn’t benedict away: the contradiction between business and science. As Thomson had hoped to register with his protest, they were obverse systems based on fundamentally antagonistic beliefs, and there were grave perils in allowing the gap between them to become too great. If perception led reality in business—and even Aldrich now called Vertex’s business development efforts, only half-jokingly, “blue smoke and mirrors”—in science the exact opposite was true. Science without verification—proof—was nothing, a shell. It needed facts, data, evidence, rigor. Vertex’s business was science, but no amount of profile building would produce a drug.

Boger had come to this place of uncommon success almost entirely on his business acumen, his story. But to design drugs he needed information, answers to basic questions, and those he still didn’t have. He had never turned away from science, not entirely, but the ultimate test of his foresight, his intelligence, the veracity of his aims and the potency of his ambitions, was in the labs. And there, unlike the undefined heap Vertex was hurtling to the top of in the Journal, he faced a much stiffer, and potentially ruinous, competition. Merck, his claims of superiority aside, still towered before him. What was more, he now had to contend with a freshly antagonized and equally ambitious Schreiber, whose own contradictions concerning business Boger himself had dramatically simplified. In that jurisdiction, Boger had yet to prove himself, and he now pointed himself headlong toward it, reasserting his leadership over Vertex’s science and plunging into those questions he’d been forced to neglect while he had been consumed with making a deal. This, he knew, not deal making, is what it would take to build a better molecule.

Boger had not come this far to falter now.