Medicine Man

Before he began developing pharmaceuticals for Merck and DuPont, Paul Anderson '63G learned the basics of chemistry elbow-to-elbow with his father at the kitchen sink. "I was fascinated by the fact that you could actually make things," he recalls with a laugh. "We made hydrogen. We made oxygen. We did the full set of classic high school chemistry experiments, but I was only in the sixth grade."

Now senior vice president for chemical and physical sciences at DuPont Pharmaceuticals Company in Wilmington, Del., Anderson is making drugs that enable millions of people to live healthier lives. Among the drugs he has helped to develop are Crixivan and Sustiva, antiviral medications prescribed for many AIDS patients; Trusopt, used to treat glaucoma; and Zocor, the most frequently prescribed drug for people with high cholesterol levels.

His work demands patience. Anderson led a team of more than a hundred scientists from 1990 to 1998 to develop Sustiva. At the end, they threw a huge party in the parking lot at DuPont. "It makes you feel really good. You realize that the things the team has worked on are having an impact on health care, helping people live more normal lives. It's very rewarding," he says.

The hard part of his job is knowing that six out of seven drugs won't make it out the door.

"The darkest times are always when you think you had a really good idea, and you discover it's flawed and it's not going to work," Anderson says. One of his most disappointing failures was an attempt to develop a new drug to treat panic attacks. "We had gone through the whole process. At the end of the road, the definitive study didn't work. Getting a 'no' at the end of one year is not so bad. Getting a 'no' at the end of 10 years is really hard," he says.

Anderson has earned national recognition for his pharmaceutical expertise, has served as president of the American Chemical Society and has been appointed to advisory councils for the National Institutes for Health and the National Research Council. But success hasn't changed him. He and his wife, Jane Oakes Anderson '60, still live in their first house, purchased in 1968, where he says he does some of his best thinking while cutting the grass. And he remains close to Robert Lyle, his mentor at UNH. When asked to name his greatest success, Anderson does not cite a particular drug; instead, he says, "Team building." His work depends on recruiting innovative thinkers and helping them to function together, and that, he says, he learned from Lyle.

Anderson currently directs projects that may someday lead to the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, reduce the incidence of post-surgery blood clots and provide safer anti-inflammatory medication. He is also active in efforts to persuade the federal government to double its investment in research over the next 10 years.

"When you look at the impact chemistry has had on the quality of life around the world, it's pretty profound. It's in the materials in the clothing we wear, the materials used to build the homes we live in, how food is prepared and stored, how it's grown and, of course, health care. Fiber optics, computers, wireless phone systems--none of these things would be possible without chemistry," he says. "The only thing you can be certain of is that whatever the future brings, chemistry will be used to create it."

--Karen Marzloff '97G

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