To compete with academia for talent, George Merck's drug program adopted a radical policy of letting its chemists publish their research. Advised by Alfred Newton Richards, this transformed industrial chemistry from a career of obscurity into an attractive alternative, making it easier to recruit top minds like Max Tischler.
In 1941, US military experts feared German pilots would use cortisone for high-altitude dominance. This specific threat prompted the new Committee for Medical Research to make cortisone synthesis its top priority, launching a coordinated national drug development effort that also included penicillin.
Vannevar Bush's pivotal idea was a system where the federal government funds research, but the work is executed in private university and industrial labs. This decentralized model harnessed existing ingenuity, contrasting with a model where scientists worked directly for the military or government-run institutions.
Josh Boger, founder of biotech firm Vertex, was the star student of Max Tischler after Tischler retired from Merck. Tischler, who led penicillin and vitamin synthesis at Merck, became Boger's "father in science," creating a direct innovation lineage from the 20th-century pharmaceutical giant to a 21st-century biotech powerhouse.
The scientific response to AIDS was marked by hyper-competitiveness and siloed "camps," a stark contrast to the collaborative spirit of WWII drug development. A proposal for a "Manhattan Project for AIDS" to share information and reagents was rejected, revealing a cultural shift away from unified crisis response.
While penicillin was a "one-off" discovery, Selman Waksman developed a systematic method to find new drugs. Reasoning that soil microbes consumed other microbes, he created a process to screen for these agents, coining the term "antibiotic" and discovering the tuberculosis drug streptomycin.