Barry Werth

Great follow up to his first book, The Billion Dollar Molecule. For me origin stories are more fascinating than the "maintenance" story. This book "feels" right with respect to the topic - its frantic prose matches the pace of science - many fits and starts - especially for a company that's 1. invested in beating out the competition with a tighter budget, 2. maturing to a proper drug producing pharmaceutical business. The investigative reporting is extremely thorough and if you're not into the science or business, it'll fail to appeal to you. For me it was too much on the financial side of things - constant monitoring of stock prices - I would have to have a better grasp of the business side to appreciate it. I liked the last part, which was quite revealing and transparent about the drug approval process from the trenches.… (mer)

Werth's book about a company's inception and its revolutionary use of rational drug design should be required reading for all in the sciences. It highlights to amazing extents the pros and cons of academia and industry, and as a current PhD student, I can fully relate to the issues. The scientific struggles of publishing and politics are all excruciatingly detailed, and you're left in awe of the immense strength and will of the characters. Werth's prose is riveting as well. I wish there were a more recent book of equal calibre, detailing maybe a company's trials in genomic medicine.… (mer)

A very interesting story of a pharmaceutical startup. So much hype, with no solid basis, and yet they survive. Werth does a good job explaining the business, the science, and the experience of doing the science.

> Scientists, unlike, say, athletes, conjure their own competition. They seldom know precisely whom they’re competing with or where they are in the race. They hear things—rumors, reports—but the information comes at a distance and with a price: It may be exaggerated, deliberately misleading, or simply false. The atmosphere in a lab in the throes of a heated project is insular, secretive, xenophobic, superheated, and paranoid.

> "There's two situations where you want to be aggressive about publishing. One is when you're behind; the other is when you're ahead. When you're ahead, you demoralize the other guy. When you're behind, you have nothing to lose. It's when you don't know that you want to be most careful."… (mer)