Barry Werth > Quotes

“During his consultations at the Kremlin, [Soviet ambassador Anatoly] Dobrynin had faced shock and incomprehension about Nixon's removal. 'They thought, how can the most powerful person in the United States, the most important person in the world, be legally forced to step down for stealing some documents?' he recalled.”
― Barry Werth, 31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today

“Boger knew that stories have to be accessible and that what investors want most from them is affirmation, so he molded Vertex’s slide show not as a disquisition on science or business strategy, but as a quest. The grail—the object of the quest—was structure-based design and its transcendent prize of safer, smarter, more profitable drugs. The impetus, as always in such stories, was a combination of righteousness and greed; Vertex had a better way to discover drugs than screening and biotechnology (both of which, Boger would say, were terminally limited) and was intent on capturing the spoils of its victory whole. The rationale for the quest was the company’s unique melding of disciplines and technologies, which he represented as a kind of circular flying wedge, and its scientists, who, he noted, all came from the world’s most powerful research institutions. Harvard, naturally, was a key supporting element, as was Merck, and on the financial side, Benno Schmidt. FK-506 and immunosuppression were the story’s set pieces, meant to illustrate its correctness.”
― Barry Werth, The Billion-Dollar Molecule: The Quest for the Perfect Drug

“conformations, or fit. Thus the rationale for structure-based design: to optimize the shapes of drug molecules. “Connecting the dots,” Aldrich liked to call it in a heroic oversimplification that made some of the scientists at the tables wince. In effect, the goal is the very opposite of screening: building the molecules one wants rather than fishing for approximations in nature. The advantages of such drugs presumably”
― Barry Werth, The Billion-Dollar Molecule: The Quest for the Perfect Drug

“Quantum gains in the molecular understanding of disease and in computer technology have recently suggested another approach for finding drugs. Called rational or structure based, it presumes to design them—atom by atom—based on a precise understanding of how molecules interact. Drugs work by selectively sticking to discrete molecular receptors, or targets, which usually are within cells. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, they interconnect—scientists use the word bind—based on complementary”
― Barry Werth, The Billion-Dollar Molecule: The Quest for the Perfect Drug

“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.”
― Barry Werth, The Billion-Dollar Molecule: The Quest for the Perfect Drug