Sure, Richard Lerner aced chemistry. But he also was a state champion wrestler at Hirsch High School and during the summers made more than one dramatic rescue while patrolling a downtown Lake Michigan beach as a captain of the lifeguards.
He had brains, muscles and a prankster's sense of humor. He once stuffed the Thanksgiving turkey with BBs from his Daisy air rifle.
"I guess I always was a little different," said Lerner, president of The Scripps Research Institute, which plans to open a Palm Beach County, Fla., biomedical laboratory in what is the center's first expansion outside of California in its 42-year history.
Indeed, at 65, Lerner is a unique figure in American science, a prize-winning chemist with an antic wit and the business acumen of an entrepreneur.
By dint of personality and will, over the past 15 years he has turned San Diego-based Scripps into the largest private research center in the United States, assembled an illustrious faculty of more than 1,000 Ph.D. biologists and chemists, and pioneered an era of unprecedented - and often controversial - partnerships with drug companies to fuel discoveries.
"He has a remarkable talent for bringing people, ideas and concepts together to make things happen," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, awarded a 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine. "I don't know of another leader who has shown the creativity and energy Richard has."
Competitive and ambitious, Lerner also has what Sharp called "an emotional need to stand at the top. It's a hunger."
That hunger - and the lure of $569 million - brought Lerner and Scripps to South Florida. In exchange for the taxpayers' largesse, Lerner has agreed to replicate Scripps in the middle of a wetland in hopes of touching off a sprawling biotech community that could generate thousands of high-paying jobs.***