{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-book-page-js","path":"/molecule/10/","result":{"data":{"mdx":{"id":"8306f6eb-831b-5959-b708-79edfb454333","body":"function _extends() { _extends = Object.assign || function (target) { for (var i = 1; i < arguments.length; i++) { var source = arguments[i]; for (var key in source) { if (Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.call(source, key)) { target[key] = source[key]; } } } return target; }; return _extends.apply(this, arguments); }\n\nfunction _objectWithoutProperties(source, excluded) { if (source == null) return {}; var target = _objectWithoutPropertiesLoose(source, excluded); var key, i; if (Object.getOwnPropertySymbols) { var sourceSymbolKeys = Object.getOwnPropertySymbols(source); for (i = 0; i < sourceSymbolKeys.length; i++) { key = sourceSymbolKeys[i]; if (excluded.indexOf(key) >= 0) continue; if (!Object.prototype.propertyIsEnumerable.call(source, key)) continue; target[key] = source[key]; } } return target; }\n\nfunction _objectWithoutPropertiesLoose(source, excluded) { if (source == null) return {}; var target = {}; var sourceKeys = Object.keys(source); var key, i; for (i = 0; i < sourceKeys.length; i++) { key = sourceKeys[i]; if (excluded.indexOf(key) >= 0) continue; target[key] = source[key]; } return target; }\n\n/* @jsxRuntime classic */\n\n/* @jsx mdx */\nvar _frontmatter = {\n  \"author\": \"Barry Werth\",\n  \"bookTitle\": \"The Billion-Dollar Molecule\",\n  \"isBook\": false,\n  \"numSections\": 25,\n  \"tags\": [\"a\"],\n  \"templateKey\": \"book-page\",\n  \"title\": \"Chapter Ten\"\n};\nvar layoutProps = {\n  _frontmatter: _frontmatter\n};\nvar MDXLayout = \"wrapper\";\nreturn function MDXContent(_ref) {\n  var components = _ref.components,\n      props = _objectWithoutProperties(_ref, [\"components\"]);\n\n  return mdx(MDXLayout, _extends({}, layoutProps, props, {\n    components: components,\n    mdxType: \"MDXLayout\"\n  }), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 0,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, mdx(\"span\", {\n    className: \"stickup\"\n  }, \"T\"), \"he 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 \", mdx(\"i\", null, \"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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 1,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Boger had prepared for the day to be a circus. By the end of it he would rachet his assessment to \\u201CFelliniesque.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 2,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Photographs of Mount Fuji in all four seasons, a prenuptial gift from Chugai, lined the walls in the conference room, and an architect\\u2019s rendering of a new four-story, postmodern company headquarters\\u2014the third, and most recent, proposal for new labs to have fallen through\\u2014hung 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\\u2019s experiments\\u2014so far all unsuccessful\\u2014into space.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 3,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Boger had spent most of the previous day\\u2019s staff meeting issuing last-minute directions. On props, he said: \\u201CAbsolutely every instrument \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_182\"\n  }), \"should be on. If it\\u2019s got a display, make it do something\\u2014in color preferably\\u201D; on staging, \\u201CI want all the Putnam people [those working in the new Putnam Avenue labs] here for the morning. It\\u2019ll make things look more exciting\\u201D; on costumes, \\u201CBe reasonably accurate; don\\u2019t 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.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 4,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Boger himself arrived that morning looking as if he\\u2019d just stepped from the shower, sartorially correct in his dark blue \\u201Cpower money suit,\\u201D monogrammed shirt, and paisley tie, his hair and beard neatly trimmed and combed. Leading Chugai\\u2019s 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 5,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Chugai was paying for Vertex\\u2019s scientists and science, but the laboratories were an indication of the company\\u2019s wealth and breeding\\u2014a secondary asset, like a trousseau\\u2014and 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 6,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CI\\u2019m afraid I need translation,\\u201D said Sam Nagayama, Chugai\\u2019s young deputy president, adjusting his glasses. Navia rubbed his fists back and forth, mimicking the interdigitation of atoms as they talk to each other.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 7,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CThese simulation show identical thing that happens in body?\\u201D Nagayama asked, to which Navia protested gently that they weren\\u2019t simulations but \\u201Cexperiments.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 8,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CIt\\u2019s all Greek to me,\\u201D Nagayama smiled, adding brightly, \\u201CYou make me feel like a fool.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 9,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"As hosts, Boger and Aldrich had taken exceptional care to satisfy the needs of their guests, to make them feel, despite Vertex\\u2019s boasting, \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_183\"\n  }), \"that the agreement was equitable and that Chugai was getting as good as it gave. Had Nagayama\\u2019s 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\\u2019s famed Public Gardens. It had consisted entirely of New England cuisine\\u2014roast quail, shelled lobster, medallions of sweet potato, pumpkin soup in whole pumpkins\\u2014and though not as inflationary as the $1000-a-head dinners provided by Chugai in Tokyo (where, as Boger observed, a whole melon \\u201Cwith a stem and a leaf\\u201D 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\\u2019d made the right purchase, even if he didn\\u2019t entirely understand what he\\u2019d bought.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 10,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"The signing was Chugai\\u2019s idea. \\u201CThe Japanese like ceremonies,\\u201D Boger told the staff, \\u201Cso we\\u2019re having a ceremony.\\u201D 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\\u2019d flown east to New York instead of Boston so he could engineer an invitation from Schmidt to finish the trip aboard Schmidt\\u2019s 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\\u2019t 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 11,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"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 \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_184\"\n  }), \"founder\\u2019s 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\\u2019s future. In a value-added world, a deal\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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, \\u201Cfeed the beast.\\u201D More than anything, the deal gave Boger his first significant opportunity to sell Vertex\\u2019s story to a wider audience, an opportunity he intended to flog at the day\\u2019s next and featured event, a press conference.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 12,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"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 \", mdx(\"i\", null, \"Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Boston Globe, Scrip,\"), \" and the four or five other journals that had survived the blandishments of Vertex\\u2019s 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 13,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CChugai,\\u201D Nagayama said (pronouncing it chu-GAI), standing at a lectern borrowed from the nearby Hyatt Regency Hotel, \\u201Crecently decided to make investment in very interesting company called Vertex. We have been very impressed with very rational approach to designing drugs.\\u201D He was stating the obvious, and the reporters understandably found little in his remarks to copy down, much less write about. And yet Nagayama\\u2019s story, like Boger\\u2019s, brimmed with subtexts, subtexts that gave away not only much about the company\\u2019s ambitions and motives but about Japan\\u2019s.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 14,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_185\"\n  }), \"Like most industries just prior to becoming part of Japan\\u2019s export juggernaut, its leading drug companies\\u2014Chugai included\\u2014were 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\\u2019s 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 15,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"The shrinking Japanese market was the main reason behind Chugai\\u2019s 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. \\u201CWe don\\u2019t see any longer the borders in business and science,\\u201D he said. \\u201COur major mission is to help patients suffering around the world.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 16,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"If the reporters were underwhelmed by a Japanese businessman telling them he was appropriating some of America\\u2019s most advanced technology in order to beat up other Japanese companies that would soon, if they hadn\\u2019t 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 \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_186\"\n  }), \"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\\u2019s access to Vertex\\u2019s 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\\u2019t 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 17,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 18,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CThere\\u2019s nothing wrong with screening if it works,\\u201D he told the reporters. \\u201CBut it rarely works. It\\u2019s trial and error. And when it fails it\\u2019s a very frustrating process because \", mdx(\"i\", null, \"you can\\u2019t do anything about it.\"), \" We\\u2019re not happy with statistically successful probabilities. We want to solve \", mdx(\"i\", null, \"problems.\"), \" We don\\u2019t want to set up ten screening programs and hope that one of them pays out.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 19,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"He went on: \\u201CWe like to go into projects where we\\u2019re 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\\u2019t 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.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 20,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Boger\\u2019s last slide was one he had made just for the occasion. It showed comparative time lines for drug development. On top\\u2014the traditional approach\\u2014was 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 \\u201CDiscovery.\\u201D On the bottom was Vertex\\u2019s approach: \\u201CDiscovery\\u201D was cut by about a third, shortening the entire bar.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 21,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CThe question is,\\u201D he said, \\u201CWhat does that get us? Since if there\\u2019s no payoff on the bottom line, there\\u2019s no reason to do this. It \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_187\"\n  }), \"gets us this: We\\u2019re in control of the process. It\\u2019s an information-based process, not a random process. It means we can get drugs faster to market and that they\\u2019ll be better drugs.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 22,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"The reporters, who hadn\\u2019t heard such a story before, perked up.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 23,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CWill you be manufacturing a drug or will Chugai?\\u201D one asked.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 24,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CWe haven\\u2019t decided yet. The deal calls for a straight fifty-fifty share of the responsibilities and rewards.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 25,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CHow will you divide the project?\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 26,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CWe\\u2019re working together.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 27,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CCould you be more specific?\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 28,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CThe discovery will be done here. But that doesn\\u2019t mean Chugai won\\u2019t have a role to play. This isn\\u2019t press-a-button-and-get-a-drug-out. It\\u2019s an interactive process.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 29,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"One appealing\\u2014and forgiving\\u2014aspect of representing a research-based company in public is the presumption of secrecy. Boger didn\\u2019t mention the nagging questions about the biological relevance of FKBP or the difficulties in solving its structure, nor was he obliged to. He didn\\u2019t explain that no small company could screen as effectively as a large one and that Vertex\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 30,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"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 \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_188\"\n  }), \"Hyatt is to researchers visiting the new Cambridge: a site of multiple seductions. Boger had worked his wiles there often.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 31,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"In a private courtyard, a banquet table groaned with posh food\\u2014medallions 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 32,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"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\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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. \\u201CI called over and told him that nobody wants him anyway, but he still didn\\u2019t come,\\u201D said Laura Engle, whom Thomson, emerging from his isolation, had quietly begun dating.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 33,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"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\\u2019s 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\\u2014much less a Max Tishler\\u2014might 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\\u2014great compromises\\u2014inherent in this mix, and \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_189\"\n  }), \"they were now made stranger and more glaring with inclusion of the Japanese.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 34,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CI told these boys to go over to Japan and bring home the bacon,\\u201D said Frank Bonsal, a venture capitalist and board member from Maryland, elbowing his way into a conversation between Nagayama and Boger\\u2019s brother Ken.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 35,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CBacon?\\u201D Nagayama said.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 36,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"\\u201CMoney.\\u201D\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 37,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"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\\u2014the easiest part\\u2014was widening his audience, which was helped considerably by the next day\\u2019s \", mdx(\"i\", null, \"Wall Street Journal.\"), \" \\u201CThe agreement promises to catapult Vertex, a closely held start-up company formed last year, into a leading role among companies employing \\u2018rational drug design\\u2019 to develop new medicines,\\u201D the paper wrote. As Boger knew, being anointed by the world\\u2019s 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\\u2014to the extent that it was known at all\\u2014as 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 38,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"And yet it also pointed up a larger stress, one that even Boger, to use his own term, couldn\\u2019t 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\\u2014and even Aldrich now called Vertex\\u2019s business development efforts, only half-jokingly, \\u201Cblue smoke and mirrors\\u201D\\u2014in science the exact opposite was true. Science without verification\\u2014proof\\u2014was nothing, a shell. It needed facts, data, evidence, rigor. Vertex\\u2019s business was science, but no amount of profile building would produce a drug.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 39,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Boger had come to this place of uncommon success almost entirely \", mdx(\"a\", {\n    id: \"page_190\"\n  }), \"on his business acumen, his story. But to design drugs he needed information, answers to basic questions, and those he still didn\\u2019t 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 \", mdx(\"i\", null, \"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\\u2019s science and plunging into those questions he\\u2019d 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.\"), mdx(ContentRef, {\n    id: 40,\n    mdxType: \"ContentRef\"\n  }, \"Boger had not come this far to falter now.\"));\n}\n;\nMDXContent.isMDXComponent = true;","fields":{"slug":"/molecule/10/"},"frontmatter":{"isBook":false,"title":"Chapter Ten","bookTitle":"The Billion-Dollar Molecule","numSections":25,"tags":["a"],"author":"Barry Werth"}}},"pageContext":{"id":"8306f6eb-831b-5959-b708-79edfb454333"}},"staticQueryHashes":["4080856488"]}