When George Yancopoulos, a 28-year-old assistant professor at Columbia, was awarded an eight-year, multimillion dollar research grant to run his own genetics lab, it seemed an opportunity too good to pass up.
But when neurologist Leonard Schleifer asked him to join his new drug company — a bare bones operation headquartered in a one-bedroom apartment at Cornell Medical College, aiming to apply gene science to the treatment of brain disorders — Yancopoulos did the unthinkable: he accepted. He is now the Chief Science Officer at Schleifer’s company, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and claims the title of the best-paid research scientist in history, earning a cool $40.3 million in compensation in 2015.
Read more about Yancopoulos’s groundbreaking work with Regeneron here.