Belgian winters are cold and gray, and in 1975 the Janssen compound at Beerse had little charm. The buildings were white, unremarkable; inside, their concrete corridors were lit by fluorescent tubes running along the ceiling. Yet for a week that winter, a young pharmacology professor named Gary Henderson from the University of California, Davis, walked through the compound feeling as though he’d been transported to some kind of chemistry Shangri-la. Laboratory after laboratory was crammed with the most intelligent, unassuming scientists, paid what an assistant professor in the United States
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