CREATING A USABLE PAST

Thirty-two years after his landmark first book, The Billion Dollar Molecule, Barry Werth returns to the world of medical research to conclude an epic trilogy. The Billion Dollar Molecule and its sequel, The Antidote, chronicle the ascendance of Big Biotech powerhouse Vertex Pharmaceuticals. They pull back the curtain on how new drugs are created and sold. The Age of Cures dramatizes the rise of American science to global preeminence in the war against disease during the middle third of the last century, the crucible of our medicalized national life and politics.

“No writer has ever gotten as deeply inside a company as Werth got inside biotech Vertex.”

–Fortune, "The 75 Smartest Books We Know"

“You would have to go back to James Watson’s 1968 The Double Helix to find a work better at communicating the throbbing excitement of a race to be the first in any kind of scientific discovery.”

–Steven Shapin, The Wall Street Journal

“Such is Mr. Werth's picture of Joshua Boger that you end up thinking of him as a magician who will keep pulling rabbits out of his hat until one of them turns out to be the cure for everything.”

–Christopher Lehmann Haupt, The New York Times

About Barry Werth

Barry Werth is an award-winning journalist and the acclaimed author of eight books. The Age of Cures culminates his four-decade search for stories that illuminate a “usable past,” a Progressive Era ideal for reclaiming history to confront the challenges of the present.

He started as a newspaper and magazine writer, succumbing in his forties to the attractions of writing narrative nonfiction books set against the Cold War. The Scarlet Professor won the Lambda Award and the American Library Association Randy Shilts Prize, and was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 31 Days shines new light on the Nixon pardon. His last book, Prisoner of Lies, chronicles the life and times of America’s longest held captive of war, who spent 21 years in Chinese prison before returning home. Reaching further back to the Gilded Age, Banquet at Delmonico's was named one of Barnes and Noble’s annual top ten nonfiction books and Amazon’s top ten history books.

His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Smithsonian, GQ, and other publications. He has taught journalism and nonfiction writing at Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and Boston University.

DRUG WARS: A TRILOGY

1 THE AGE OF CURES

How American Scientists Saved Your Life

The Age of Cures brings alive the triumph and hope of American medical research during the mid-twentieth century. After the 1918 Influenza, the deadliest pandemic in modern times, only the German Empire possessed the industrial might, chemical know-how, and medical insight to create “magic bullets” — targeted molecules to cure diseases. America’s diffuse research laboratories, clinics, medical schools, hospitals, and drug companies lagged far behind: uncoordinated, self-funded, obscure. Sick people suffered without hope, consuming useless, unregulated nostrums that were mostly alcohol.

Six visionaries — innovative process chemist Max Tishler, Harvard president and World War II weapon’s czar James Conant, drug-maker George Merck, presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush, microbiologist and antibiotic pioneer Selman Waksman, and wartime medical administrator A.N. Richards — reversed all that. America emerged from the war with a new preeminence in pharmaceuticals and a soaring self-confidence in the life sciences, unleashing a cornucopia of “miracle” drugs: penicillin, streptomycin, vitamin B-12, anti-psychotics, cancer chemotherapy, the Salk polio vaccine, and, especially, corticosteroids, that transformed modern medicine. Life expectancy nearly doubled in a few generations. At the same time, the world darkened under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear war. Half of these same warrior-scientists engineered that outcome, too.

At Merck, Max Tishler and his teams produced the first penicillin to save the lives of patients, the first streptomycin, the first B-12, and the first cortisone. George Merck made the cover of Time magazine above the caption, “Drugs are for people; not for profit.” By the 1980s his company was America’s most admired corporation year after year, lauded equally for its pioneering medicines, corporate conscience, and surging stock price.

The Age of Cures majestically weaves the tapestry of events that launched
America’s 80-year dominance in medical science, the genesis for our present moment when it is under violent attack. And it shines instructive new light on the rise of Vertex and the new biopharmaceutical order it represents — a life-and-health-welfare expanding ecosystem under threat, incredibly, from the White House.

The Age of Cures is now available for preorder.

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2 THE BILLION DOLLAR MOLECULE

The Quest for the Perfect Drug

A classic of science and business journalism, The Billion Dollar Molecule tells the story of a daring upstart that challenged Big Pharma. Werth pulls back the curtain on Vertex, a start-up pharmaceutical company, and witnesses 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 and Max Tishler’s prize student and acolyte, 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.

This brings Boger and his revolutionary “torch bearers” in direct head-to-head

competition with Harvard and Merck both, elevating the stakes for all. With

unprecedented access, Barry Werth reports the drama from the inside. 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 at the height of the AIDS crisis. A fascinating no-holds-barred account of the business of science, with a new introduction by the author.

Praise for The Billion Dollar Molecule:

“A high-stakes tale of adventure and intrigue: Barbarians at the Lab…Werth’s

work is a gem.”

–The Washington Post

“No writer has ever gotten as deeply inside a company as Werth got inside

biotech Vertex. He offers deep insight into difficulties of drug discovery, the trials and tribulations of startups, and the conflict between great science and good business.”

–Fortune, “The 75 Smartest Books We Know"

“A riveting tale that has more in common with a John Grisham thriller than with tomes on modern science.”

–Businessweek

“A truly masterful combination of science writing, business sophistication, and

simple page-turning narrative skill. This book will help any reader better

understand the fundamental scientific changes shaping the world, as well as the financial climate in which modern American businesses succeed or fail. I greatly admire the dexterity with which Barry Werth has carried this project off. This is a gripping and important book.”

–James Fallows

“A razzle-dazzle new saga.”

–The New York Times

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3 THE ANTIDOTE

Inside the World of New Pharma

In The Antidote, Barry Werth draws upon unprecedented inside reporting

spanning more than two decades to provide a groundbreaking closeup of the

innovative pharmaceutical company Vertex and the ferocious but indispensable world of Big Pharma that it inhabits.

In 1989, Joshua Boger left Merck, then America’s most admired business, to

found a drug company that would challenge industry giants and transform health care. Werth described the company’s tumultuous early days during the AIDS crisis in The Billion Dollar Molecule. Now he returns to tell a riveting story of Vertex’s bold endurance and eventual success.

The $650 billion-a-year pharmaceutical business is America’s toughest and one of its most profitable. It’s riskier and more rigorous at just about every stage than any other business, from the towering biological uncertainties inherent in its mission to treat disease; to the 30-to-1 failure rate in bringing out a successful medicine even after a molecule clears all the hurdles to get to human testing; to the multibillion-dollar cost of ramping up a successful product; to operating in the world’s most regulated industry, matched only by nuclear power.

Werth captures the full scope of Vertex’s twenty-five year drive to deliver

breakthrough medicines. At a time when America struggles to maintain its

innovative edge, The Antidote is a powerful inside look at one of the most

intriguing and important business stories of recent decades.

Praise for The Antidote:

“A riveting mix of molecular science, big personalities — and big money.”

–Nature

“The vividness and rich detail of The Antidote make it a gripping coming-of-age story for modern corporate and scientific times.”

–The Wall Street Journal

“Werth’s excellent writing takes the reader deep into the heart of Vertex and into the dilemma facing the biotech pioneers, and us all.”

–Fortune.com

“As Werth tells the story of Vertex’s teenage and early adult years, it’s hard not to dream of what the full realization of Boger’s ‘social experiment‘ could look like: an innovative, productive, science- and patient-focused respected global pharma company that retains the culture and drive of a freshly-minted biotech. Sometime, somewhere, a future biopharma CEO will hopefully read The Antidote and be inspired to continue the quest.”

–Pharmagellan

“Barry Werth’s new book does for the world of biotech drug development what The Soul of a New Machine did for the dawn of the computer age. It presents an exciting narrative about the business of bringing new products to market.”

–The Boston Globe

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