An interesting tale of how personal ambition, scientific curiosity, and the pursuit of wealth led to life-extending drugs.
The story of two small biotech firms who vied to dominate the market for a cancer drug and reaped billions of dollars in compensation.
During the “great biotechnology decade of the 2010s,” Pharmacyclics and Acerta, both based in California, worked feverishly to develop a new drug that used BTK inhibitors to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia with minimal side effects. Vardi, managing editor at MarketWatch and former senior editor at Forbes, tells a fascinating story of the science behind this approach and the financial arrangements, medical controversies, regulatory processes, and business rivalries without which the two competing drugs—Imbruvica and Calquence—would not have become publicly available. Driving the quest was the possibility of huge sales; in 2020, Imbruvica had $6.6 billion in revenues. Such sales would enable the companies to be sold to bigger biotech companies, with massive payouts to investors and management. The major investor in Pharmacyclics, for example, made $3.5 billion on his $50 million investment. Vardi brings readers on to significant phone calls, places them at management meetings, and reveals in detail the deliberations that occurred among investors, medical officers, hospital doctors, and federal regulators. We learn the backstories of the key participants and the science and politics behind experimental drug trials, the competition among venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, and the strategic calculations of big pharma (Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca) as it engaged the “small biotech companies with experimental therapies” then dominating research and development. Tens of thousands of patients eventually benefitted, although the financial burden—a blood cancer drug can cost $10,000 per month and has to be taken for the duration of the patient’s life—is staggering. The book will appeal to readers of Brendan Borrell’s The First Shot and Gregory Zuckerman’s A Shot To Save the World.
An interesting tale of how personal ambition, scientific curiosity, and the pursuit of wealth led to life-extending drugs.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-393-54095-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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