Year: 2024

In an unmarked laboratory stationed between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a splinter group of scientists is hunting for the next billion-dollar drug.The group, bankrolled with $500 million from some of the wealthiest families in American business, has created a stir in the world of academia by dangling seven-figure paydays to lure highly credentialed university professors to a for-profit bounty hunt. Its self-described goal: to avoid the blockages and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies, and discover scores of new drugs (at first, for cancer and…

The young father headed across the parking lot to join the other parents meeting their children’s new preschool teachers. After a few steps, he began sweating and twitching. As the sky reeled, he staggered back to the car, desperate to lie down in the back seat and breathe, hidden by tinted windows.“Did you take something?” his wife, Anne, shouted at him while dialing 911. Eric, 26, had completed rehab earlier in the summer.“The shot! The shot!” he groaned, just before he hit the ground and blacked out.In the emergency room of a nearby hospital in southern New Jersey, doctors tried…