Medicine, Science, and Merck
http://www.100md.com
《新英格兰医药杂志》
Writing one's life is a risky venture of memory, invention, and desire. With intellectual depth and formal rigor, Roy Vagelos and the historian Louis Galambos have written a serious and nourishing report of Vagelos's life in medicine, science, and the corporate world.
Vagelos became chief executive officer of Merck by way of an authoritative career as a cardiologist and biochemist, as a National Institutes of Health scientist at the forward edge of research on the biosynthesis and control of cholesterol, as chair of the Department of Biological Chemistry at Washington University, and as a research scientist at Merck. His scientific life is animated by a set of enduring questions about lipids and heart disease. Spanning enzyme research, molecular genetics, human trials, and the marketing of statins, his career helped to usher in our current powers in preventive cardiology. His interior life has been informed by a set of enduring values, which were derived from the Greek immigrant experience of the Great Depression. By making ice cream and working the sandwich counter in his father's delicatessen in Westfield, New Jersey, Vagelos infused duty and familial loyalty into his bones.
Medicine, Science, and Merck achieves the goals of autobiography by making the present transparent with the past, showing the subject — as both narrator and protagonist — reflecting on his past actions and making sense of them in the light of present knowledge. The book is a seamless weave of many stories — of the familial and cultural, of the complex fellowship among colleagues, and of the science itself, all the way down to the tales of molecules. The reader not only absorbs each strand of the narrative but also recognizes that these strands are irrevocably linked, that there is no science without them. There is no need to "humanize" science or medicine; it comes to the reader, because the science or medicine itself is humanizing as long as one is equipped with the imagination to heed its generative purpose. (Vagelos's full given name is Pindaros Roy; he lives up to his namesake, the classical Greek poet Pindar.)
This is also a moral book. Like an active pump on a membrane, Vagelos injects his idealism into Merck's corporate setting, enacting values of accountability, altruism, and devotion even while toeing the bottom line. Merck's decision to make ivermectin available free to cure river blindness in sub-Saharan Africa presages efforts of the industry, one hopes, to make other pharmaceutical agents affordable.
This journey shines with optimism for all of us who have become demoralized by the failure of the ideals of science, medicine, and the corporate world and by the threat of defeat of our shared ethical vision. The book also gives heart to the reader to take a similar look at his or her journey, assessing its enduring values, measuring its missed opportunities, admiring its texture. Medicine, Science, and Merck brings into focus hard questions about the social costs of corporate profit structures, scientific pride, and the hunger for political power. No doubt this is but a partial report; no doubt others can tell competing versions of these events. Nonetheless, the moral freshness of the effort poses a challenge to us all to live within our cosmos as searchers, risk takers, beholders of the complexity of our world, and servants to its needs.
Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D.
Columbia University
New York, NY 10032
rac5@columbia.edu(By Roy Vagelos and Louis )
Vagelos became chief executive officer of Merck by way of an authoritative career as a cardiologist and biochemist, as a National Institutes of Health scientist at the forward edge of research on the biosynthesis and control of cholesterol, as chair of the Department of Biological Chemistry at Washington University, and as a research scientist at Merck. His scientific life is animated by a set of enduring questions about lipids and heart disease. Spanning enzyme research, molecular genetics, human trials, and the marketing of statins, his career helped to usher in our current powers in preventive cardiology. His interior life has been informed by a set of enduring values, which were derived from the Greek immigrant experience of the Great Depression. By making ice cream and working the sandwich counter in his father's delicatessen in Westfield, New Jersey, Vagelos infused duty and familial loyalty into his bones.
Medicine, Science, and Merck achieves the goals of autobiography by making the present transparent with the past, showing the subject — as both narrator and protagonist — reflecting on his past actions and making sense of them in the light of present knowledge. The book is a seamless weave of many stories — of the familial and cultural, of the complex fellowship among colleagues, and of the science itself, all the way down to the tales of molecules. The reader not only absorbs each strand of the narrative but also recognizes that these strands are irrevocably linked, that there is no science without them. There is no need to "humanize" science or medicine; it comes to the reader, because the science or medicine itself is humanizing as long as one is equipped with the imagination to heed its generative purpose. (Vagelos's full given name is Pindaros Roy; he lives up to his namesake, the classical Greek poet Pindar.)
This is also a moral book. Like an active pump on a membrane, Vagelos injects his idealism into Merck's corporate setting, enacting values of accountability, altruism, and devotion even while toeing the bottom line. Merck's decision to make ivermectin available free to cure river blindness in sub-Saharan Africa presages efforts of the industry, one hopes, to make other pharmaceutical agents affordable.
This journey shines with optimism for all of us who have become demoralized by the failure of the ideals of science, medicine, and the corporate world and by the threat of defeat of our shared ethical vision. The book also gives heart to the reader to take a similar look at his or her journey, assessing its enduring values, measuring its missed opportunities, admiring its texture. Medicine, Science, and Merck brings into focus hard questions about the social costs of corporate profit structures, scientific pride, and the hunger for political power. No doubt this is but a partial report; no doubt others can tell competing versions of these events. Nonetheless, the moral freshness of the effort poses a challenge to us all to live within our cosmos as searchers, risk takers, beholders of the complexity of our world, and servants to its needs.
Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D.
Columbia University
New York, NY 10032
rac5@columbia.edu(By Roy Vagelos and Louis )