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Chapter 5 | The Billion Dollar Molecule

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It was not the pure protein. Thomson had isolated a substance that had the same molecular weight and abundance as Harding’s FKBP. But as he analyzed it, he discovered a second constituent—assumably another protein—almost identical in size to the first. Thomson was distraught. He believed he was jeopardizing the company and that others blamed him for it. Typically, Boger consoled him that any information, however discouraging, was “money in the bank,” but Thomson refused to be cut any slack. He would now go back and find out what was in his mixture—another dark, slippery descent, as Vertex still had no specific assays to guide him. Science, as Nobel laureate David Baltimore has observed, proceeds “not from truth to truth, but from suggestion to suggestion,” and Thomson was buoyed instinctively by the suggestion that his two molecules might be linked by some other feature besides size. The chemical pathway that included FKBP remained unknown, and it was still uncertain what the protein d

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