Matthew Herper in Stat:
Nils Lonberg, a scientist at the center of a revolution in cancer therapy, has had a career full of fateful decisions. One of the most crucial: buying an entire bottle of whiskey at a hotel bar.
It was 1998. Lonberg had just been part of a group dinner with Jim Allison, the charismatic, harmonica-playing scientist who would go on to win a Nobel Prize. After the meal, Lonberg took Allison aside and invited him to have a drink; they stayed up drinking, and talking, until the wee small hours of the morning.
Allison had been trying to find a company to turn his discoveries into life-changing medicines. Lonberg, at the time an executive at a small company, wanted to be the one to make it happen.
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