The X-Men Approach to Medicine
A billionaire scientist is studying genetic mutations to develop treatments for everything from asthma to arthritis.
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For most people in George Yancopoulos’s position, the job offer would have been easy to refuse. Yancopoulos, a 28-year-old assistant professor at Columbia, had just won an eight-year, multimillion-dollar research grant to run his own genetics lab. The job offer was from Leonard Schleifer, a trained neurologist with no business background: Come join my new drug company, headquartered in a one-bedroom apartment at Cornell Medical College.
This was 1988. Schleifer said he wanted to apply the latest gene science to treating disorders of the brain, but he didn’t know enough about it—the DNA revolution was still new. Yancopoulos was to be the resident gene jockey.