When Paul Herrling didn't do his homework at his Swiss boarding school, the facility's science-loving director devised unusual punishments. The then-teenaged Herrling, now Novartis' head of corporate research, had to catalog the man's collection of crickets, which the director had recovered from ice, ages old, on a nearby Italian mountain. "He was studying glacial repopulation," says Herrling.
The discipline, and the fervor of the director's science lectures, opened Herrling's eyes to biology. "With every lesson, I was learning absolutely astonishing stuff," he explains.
Herrling was hired in 1975 when the Swiss government, he says, was telling drug houses to hire their own instead of the better-trained English scientists. Multilingual and well traveled, Herrling visits Singapore six times a year, where he directs the newly established Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases. He spent his youth in Alexandria, Egypt.
He makes the most of his time on the road. An accomplished antiquarian, ...
