Big Pharma's Home

摘要

There are times when a certain state of affairs arrives as a result of enormously calculated endeavors, and there are times when the phenomenon of chance seems to preside. The fact that New Jersey has emerged as the nation's foremost pharmaceutical corridor seems to be the latter case. After all, who knew that when someone posted a "To Let" sign on a four-story brick building in New Brunswick on an afternoon in 1886, James Wood Johnson (co-founder of Johnson &John-son) would be looking out the window of his Philadelphia-bound train as it ap- proached the Raritan River? Who knew that when two traveling salesmen, Maxwell Becton and Fairleigh Dickinson, met for the first time in a breakfast establishment in Texas one morning in 1897, not only would the two go on to form medical-technology company Becton, Dickinson and Company, but, 10 years later, a French immigrant living in New Jersey would convince the duo to establish their company's headquarters in East Rutherford? And before Nelson Peterson's drive through the New Jersey countryside in 1928, who could have guessed that this Hoffman-La Roche COO would stop off for gas in a township called Nutley, where he would see something along the horizon that would cause him to move his company nearby?