The Billion Dollar Molecule: One Company’s Quest for the Perfect Drug
May 6, 2010 by biotechbillboard.com
- ISBN13: 9780671510572
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Join journalist Barry Werth as he pulls back the curtain on Vertex, a start-up pharmaceutical company, and witness firsthand the intense drama being played out in the pioneering and hugely profitable field of drug research. Founded by Joshua Boger, a dynamic Harvard- and Merck-trained scientific whiz kid, Vertex is dedicated to designing — atom by atom — both a new life-saving immunosuppressant drug, and a drug to combat the virus that causes AIDS.
You will be hooked from start to finish, as you go from the labs, where obsessive, fiercely competitive scientists struggle for a breakthrough, to Wall Street, where the wheeling and dealing takes on a life of its own, as Boger courts investors and finally decides to take Vertex public. Here is a fascinating no-holds-barred account of the business of science, which includes an updated epilogue about the most recent developments in the quest for a drug to cure AIDS.Amazon.com Review
From test tubes to the Wall Street IPO and beyond, this is the riveting true story of a start-up pharmaceutical company working to create an anti-AIDS drug. Scientifically accurate, yet written with an attention to plot, timing, dialogue, and development of character more characteristic of the best thrillers.
Buy from AMAZON The Billion Dollar Molecule: One Company’s Quest for the Perfect Drug
This book garnered fifteen five star reviews at Amazon.com. Frankly I don’t see how. After sloughing through 250 pages of exasperatingly detailed, fictionalized melodrama, I returned this book to the library.
“BILLION DOLLAR MOLECULE: THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT DRUG” by Barry Werth is a diatribe against the defenseless scientists it purports to portray and reflects a jaded perspective that tells us more about Werth’s dim view of human nature than about how Vertex became a success.
The characters are sketched almost uniformly as embodying the worst traits in human nature: narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, petty, conniving, ruthless schemers, and academic back stabbers. The character of one Dr. Schreiber, a distinguished researcher and scientist, is pummeled into submission, portrayed as utterly base, calculating and disingenuous. Schreiber is Mr. Werth’s straight man, a punching bag for the author’s preoccupation with uncovering the ugliness that mysteriously lurks within the rarefied air of scientific enterprise. This book offers up a Machiavellian smorgasbord of character flaws, a feast of delights for those who enjoy a good food fight along with their meal.
Werth portrays his characters, mostly scientists, as inveterate workaholics, utterly clueless as to the meaning of work-life balance, driven to the point of destroying their health even as they seek to create drugs that save and extend the lives of others.
The overwhelming focus on the cult of personality severely detracts from the book’s message. It is simply implausible to believe that such top caliber scientists with stellar records of scientific achievement climbed to the top by dropping sludge from the back of a truck and treating their colleagues like adolescent brothers a couple of years apart. Perhaps this is the way Barry Werth sees the world, but it is a jaundiced view in my opinion. I simply refuse to believe that the prototypical biotech entrepreneur is a clone of Samuel Waksal.
This book fails to clearly explain the biological context of its more challenging scientific concepts. Mr. Werth assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader as if this book was written for the life science cognoscenti to gossip about at the water cooler.
Werth often has little or no regard for the terms he so loosely bandies about. Why wasn’t there a glossary to explain the more esoteric terms in the text? Would it have been so difficult to include a few skeletal illustrations for those without a strong background in molecular biology or proteomics? Even Michael Crichton includes some reference material in his books and they are fiction.
This book, a 464 page soap opera, is more helium than substance and that is being charitable. It is really a book about Mr. Werth’s phantasmagoric view of how new drug discovery proceeds. I would venture that the sordid descriptions pinned to these characters would leave them aghast (if they had time to come up for air), their distinguished careers warped in a series of fun house mirrors. Or perhaps, given the utter implausibility of the portrayals, these folks had a good laugh about it, chalking it up as historical satire, reality TV with a scientific aura.
This book could have aptly been named “Who Moved My Cheese from the Lab While I Was on Steroids”. I read this book to gain an inside view of biotechnology discovery, but the view I ended up with was one of fantasy, a parallel universe where the noble pursuit of scientific discovery is trumped by a Darth Vader triple helix of avarice, greed and cynicism – a universe I won’t be visiting any time soon.
Rating: 1 / 5
The book describes the journey of one small biotech startup complany toward the end of the age of biotech startup companies. Its a good book if you are thinking of starting a biotech, or just think the idea is cool. This book will teach you a little about what it takes to be successfull.
Rating: 4 / 5
A wonderful story of the trials and successes of a pharmaceutical start-up, based on the premise of structure based drug design. The books provides valuable insight into what it takes to help run and work inside such a company.
Rating: 5 / 5
awesome book about a start up in the pharmaceutical industry. a must for everybody who works in this field or who thinks about founding a company in the chemical/pharmaceutical/biochemical field. a must read!
Rating: 5 / 5