Medicine, Science, and Merck
Roy Vagelos and Louis Galambos
2004, Cambridge University Press
314 pp
Cloth, 9.2 x 5.9 x 1.0 inches, ISBN 0-521-66295-8
$30.00
Signed by Roy Vagelos!
In Medicine, Science, and Merck, the authors trace the career of a son of Greek immigrants as he mastered three professions and ultimately became the CEO of America's most admired corporation, the multinational pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., Inc. As the authors show, there was hope even for a wise-cracking kid living through the hard times of the 1930s. Education brought out the scholar in Roy Vagelos, who left his family's small restaurant to attend the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. At the National Institutes of Health, he mastered biochemistry; at Washington University, he became a distinguished science administrator; and at Merck, he headed the pharmaceutical industry's most innovative laboratory and then became its CEO. Throughout, he never lost touch with his family values, his intense desire to help others, or his faith in the partnership principle and the competition that makes it work.
P. Roy Vagelos is retired chairman of Merck; chairman of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals; and chairman of Theravance Corporation.
Louis Galambos is professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and coeditor of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower. He is the coauthor of The Fall of the Bell System (Cambridge, 1987), Networks of Innovation (Cambridge, 1995), and Anytime, Anywhere (Cambridge, 2002).