The Believer

摘要

For steven kriegsman the hardest part of his parents' deaths was watching them endure years of pain and suffering from obesity-related ailments and the onset of blindness. "Their quality of life for 15 years was horrendous," Kriegsman, 62, says quietly. That awful experience prompted the onetime investment banker for health care companies to turn research entrepreneur. In a reverse merger with an investment fund he controlled, Kriegsman became the chief executive and largest shareholder of Cytrx Corp., a fledgling biotech outfit he's reinvented as a developer of drugs based on ribonucleic acid interference, or "gene silencing." He then persuaded such notables as 1998 Nobel Prize for Medicine winner Louis Ignarro and Craig Mello, a pioneering RNA interference researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, to join the company's scientific advisory board. Says Kriegsman, "Money is not really the objective."