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.
