Colorful, packed with facts and delivering a clear message: that the risks of investing in biotechnology aren't just...
A you-are-there account of the turbulent early days of Vertex, a high-tech, high-risk biotechnology firm.
Werth (a freelance science and business writer) spent nearly four years following the travails of Vertex, where he seemingly had considerable access to its inner workings. His story begins in 1989, shortly after the company was launched with $10 million in venture capital—and with a plan to design superior new drugs, atom by atom if necessary. Vertex's chief, the brilliant and exuberant chemist Joshua Boger, is convinced that the company can design a safer immunosuppressive drug and capture the multimillion-dollar-a-year transplant market. Doing so will require brains, time, and lots of money, but Boger brings together the brains and raises the money that buys the time. Negotiating with pharmaceutical firms in England (Glaxo) and Japan (Chugai), he gives Vertex temporary financial security by striking a deal with Chugai and, in 1991, he takes Vertex public. Meanwhile, back at the lab, it turns out that the scientific side of the firm's endeavors aren't as straightforward as Boger's presentations to would-be investors might suggest: There are complications, rivalries, disappointments, and no end of technical problems, and, at the conclusion of the narrative, Vertex still has no product to sell, although its expectations remain high. Throughout, Werth—adept at explaining both science and business—provides enough history to anchor the present, and peoples his story with memorable characters: Besides the energetic, charismatic Boger and his crew of talented, eccentric, overworked chemists and biologists, notable are Harvard researcher Stuart Schreiber—exasperating as a colleague, devastating as a rival—and aging transplant-wizard Thomas Starzl (The Puzzle People, 1992).
Colorful, packed with facts and delivering a clear message: that the risks of investing in biotechnology aren't just high—they're stratospheric.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-72327-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
A grimly amusing, occasionally off-putting first novel set in an eating disorders clinic. At nearly five eleven and 92 pounds, 25-year-old Alice Forrester, is the thinnest of all the anorexics in the upscale eating disorders clinic of Seaview Hospital, near Boston, where she's been admitted following a near-fatal heart attack. For a woman like Alice, who views her resistance to food as a spiritual achievementa Gnostic differentiation between desire and needthis new evidence of her own self-control is intensely satisfying, and she eyes the bulimics, fitness addicts, and obese women on her floor with far more disgust than pity. Still, a girl can only survive the clinic's monotonous routine of group therapy, individual therapy, art therapy, and family therapy with friends; her uneasy alliances with Gwen, a delicate trust-fund victim whose anorexia is actually causing her bones to crumble, and Louise, a food addict, prompt Alice to examine the origins of her own asceticism in her chilly relations with her successful, narcissistic parents and in her first love, a black homosexual who introduced her to sex with disastrous results. Fortunately, Alice's morose musings are soon interrupted by a new arrival: Maeve Sullivan, a slutty, voluptuous bulimic whose desire to consume everything, including and especially life itself, horrifies yet fascinates self-denying Alice. Maeve's casual trysts, her wolfing down of sugary deserts and then nonchalantly vomiting into whatever trash can is available, and her surprising habit of baring her large breasts for Alice's admiration are just what this frightened girl needs. Alice surrenders herself utterly to Maeve, who naturally soon abandons her, but not without leaving our love- starved young heroine with just enough hunger for life to carry on. An intriguing view of the world through an anorexic's eyesand no fault of the author's if that view is often an unpleasant one. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-75518-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A superb examination of early feminist politics. As a case study for sexual politics in late 19th century Britain, Bland (Women's Studies/North London Polytechnic) focuses on the middle-class ``Men and Women's Club'' started in 1885 with the goal of scientifically discussing all things pertaining to the relations between men and women. Based on club minutes, personal communications, and public records, Bland's exhaustive analysis explores gender relations at a crucial time in the history of women's rights. The club members, Bland's prototypical feminists, appropriated religious, medical, and evolutionary theory to influence debates about the role of women in society. They turned public attention to the picture of the dangerous male unable to control his sexual desires, endangering women, children, and all morality. According to Bland, since women were considered morally superior to men, they were also responsible for the moral development of society. Women, in effect, were constantly battling the beast in all men, and this responsibility was their ticket to entering social and political arenas: Suffrage, for example, was necessary for women to implement their moral authority. In the final chapter, Bland ties together the extensive history of feminist thought with current debates. Most importantly, she outlines the danger of repeating repressive politics, pointing to the irony in current anti-porn debates: ``In presenting women as . . . passive objects of a monolithic lustful male sexuality (man as the `beast'), contemporary campaigners recreate the fantasy world of porn and all its misinformation about sexuality.'' Similarly the early feminists, in their ``zeal for the abolition of prostitution,'' focused on the sex workers rather than their male customers, obscuring the sexual inequality at the core of such gendered interaction. Packed with historical details, this work captures the spirit and conflicts of feminist thought. (13 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-307-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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