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Chapter 6 | The Billion-Dollar Molecule

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In the weeks before the Glaxo visit, when not only Thomson but all of Vertex’s scientists were working feverishly, Boger often sat at his desk cranelike and unmoving for long periods, his eyes fixed on a computer screen, a look about him of preternatural composure. Occasionally he unfurled several long fingers to type something or reached without looking into a foot-high mound of plastic slide envelopes stacked precariously at his left. Extracting a slide, he examined it against the light, then put it in a small box or returned it to its slot, his visage unchanged. He stopped eating during these times, causing Roger Tung, one of the chemists, to suggest that he was an autotroph, an organism of such exquisite metabolism that it supplies its own food and can live on air. Compared with the researchers’ own anxious exertions and the towering unknowns that swirled before them, Boger’s calm and assiduous attention to his slides seemed to many of them—dangerously, a few argued—aloof. Boger th

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