The Day Novartis Chose Discovery

How a Swiss pharma giant built the last great corporate research skunkworks - and why that model may never work again.

In 2002, Mark Fishman walked into a glass building in Cambridge with an unusual assignment: to turn the Swiss pharmaceutical company, Novartis, into the world’s greatest therapeutics research firm. More unusually still, Fishman was - at least on paper - precisely the wrong man for the job. The Harvard cardiologist had spent his career studying zebrafish hearts and teaching medical students. He had no pharmaceutical experience and no business training. And yet, Daniel Vasella - the physician-turned-CEO who had overseen the merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz to form Novartis1 back in 1996 - had…

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