Rating: 
Summary: A excellent cross between business text and fiction
Review: I read this book a couple of years ago and enjoyed it very much. Over time I have forgetten about it. But lately I've been doing research into new business creation and remembered this well written book. Many of the dry lessons of academic research are presented in a case study that reads like fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Great book.Well written. Very informative re;pharmaceuticals
Review: I read this book a few years ago and mention it to many of my associates in academia. It is a must read for people who are professors at pharmacy schools.
Rating:
Summary: Put this on your list of biotech must reads.
Review: I read this book years ago, yet recall most of its details. It tells the tale of Josh Boger who came out of Harvard to start Vertex Pharmaceuticals, taking you in a captivating fashion through every delicate step from inception to maturity of this company in its quest for the big drug score.Having spent almost 18 years in this industry as a scientist and entrepreneur myself I can testify to its accurate portrayl of what it is like to start a typical therapeutic biotech. This book provides unique incite into the world of start-up biotechs and the risks that come with them. It even manages to scuttle through the many interesting dynamics of biotech personalities where primadonna scientific wiz kids meet bottom line suits with calculators and some hybridize into a combination of the two. If you are a potential investor, wish to work in this industry, or already do or even a patient wondering why your treatment/cure is not yet on market and want to understand more about the economics of biotechnology and drug discovery and development from the ground up, this is a must read. It will edify you and entertain you at the same time and you will end up rooting for Josh along the way.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping... and, um, educational
Review: If you are even remotely curious about biotech and the hype around the industry, read this book! It's the inside scoop from people to lab work to venture capitalists. I felt as if I was living the start-up experience too. I couldn't even stand the tension as I read the book, so I put it down to check the Internet to find out whether the company made it or not.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping... and, um, educational
Review: If you are even remotely curious about biotech and the hype around the industry, read this book! It's the inside scoop from people to lab work to venture capitalists. I felt as if I was living the start-up experience too. I couldn't even stand the tension as I read the book, so I put it down to check the Internet to find out whether the company made it or not.
Rating:
Summary: A great book anyway you read it
Review: Not knowing anything about the industry or chemistry or biology for that matter ( two of my most hated subjects in college) I began reading this book with low expectations, I could not have been so wrong!! Not only this book is incredible from the science side, but the beauty of it is how it gets into the complex inner thoughts of all people involved. Truly one of the best book I have ever read. A real masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: A Fictionalized Tale of Venality and Banality
Review: 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:
Summary: Real eye opener
Review: This book is excellent in many ways. As with similar books of equal caliber, ie Liar's Poker, this book is both a primer on the industry in question (biotech), serving to lay out the rules of the game as they are actually played, as well as giving the reader an eye-opening account of one highly ambitious entrepreneur and his quest to build a billion dollar company by rewriting those very rules.
Rating:
Summary: The best science backstage book since The Double Helix
Review: This is an incredible book, sometimes I don't know why Josh Bogerand the rest permitted it, it is the most complete and candid disclosure in biomedicine I have the privilege to read, I will made it obligatory lecture to my students. Thank you Mr. Werth.
Rating:
Summary: difficult, fascinating, and compelling birth of a company
Review: This is the story of the first few years of Vertex, a bioventure that sought to create drugs that were constructed molecule by molecule - it is supposed to be "rational drug design". In exchange for allowing the company to check his work for accuracy and proprietary disclosures, Werth was admitted into the inner circle of the company, with both executives and scientists, for four years.
Werth offers masterful descriptions of both the science and the intricacies of the busisess deals. The work is similar to that of Tracy Kidder in "The Soul of a New Machine" and, in my opinion, of the same quality.
At the center of the story is Vertex's founding visionary, Joshua Boger, formerly a researcher at Merck. He reasoned that instead of screening soil samples and insect secretions in a hot or miss approach in thousands of petri dishes, he could design drugs atom by atom to bind to - and thus inactivate - molecules instrumental to the disease process. In theory, these drugs would be without side effects: because of the precision of the design, they would adhere to their target alone, allowing beneficial enzymes of other chem reactions to go on unimpeded.
Boger's first target molecule was FKBP, which he believed was a crucial agent of the immune system. By blocking it, he hoped to prevent the host's body from rejecting transplanted organs. While Boger was out raising money (eventually reaching $60 million), Vertex's researchers hunkered down to isolate and analyze FKBP, whose molecular mechanic remained poorly understood.
Unfortunately, what happened is a great example of the difficulties in marrying business to cutting-edge science: after over two years of pushing themselves to the brink of nervous collapse, Vertex scientists found difficulties with FKBP. Even worse, Boger's arch rival, a prof at Harvard, discovered why. The prof beat VErtex, Werth argues, because he remained outside the venture capital game and could thus concentrate totally on the science and could openly collaborate with them rather than hide proprietary results.
Nonetheless, driven and confident as ever, Boger turned his scientific team onto the new problem. Thru all of this, Boger comes off as a fascinating character: the son of a suicide, he is unshakably convinced that he can bend nature as well as the business world to his will. The reader sees what lies behind the herculean efforts of him and his team.
Warmly recommended as a rivetting tale of human endeavor that embraces the true complexity.
| 
