So, This Is What a Biotech Tycoon Looks Like

The biotech tycoon has become something of a ballet fan. Proof of this fact sits right across Marblehead Harbor. Or rather, it will. From the back porch of his comfortable house, Henri Termeer stands with his face to the wind and his arm to the water and points to a spot just out of view. Up there on Leggs Hill, construction workers are fastening steel and glass to his exacting specifications, building a 90,000-square-foot YMCA complex that, when it opens this fall, will feature a giant wing with studio space where Boston Ballet will hold classes.

The partnership between the two nonprofits was Termeer's idea—one into which he's put $2 million of his own—and like everything he gets wrapped up in, he manages the particulars with a keen eye. And so it was that administrative offices were shrunk to accommodate more lounging room for moms and dads (among them Termeer himself, who admits a winking desire to create a place not only for his seven-year-old daughter to dance, but also for him to take a load off). "This is crazy that the parent is not thought of," he says with a grin. He's got a patrician flop of reddish hair pushed off to the right and eyes that squint from deep beneath heavy lids, but the effect is not that he looks half-asleep. His countenance, instead, is of someone perpetually working through a crossword puzzle.

In addition to the cozy chairs for the ballet parents, he's also stipulated that there be good coffee on hand. And the decision to build the walls out of glass—that was all Termeer, too. ("This is not somebody who just writes a check," says Elizabeth Benjes, who heads Boston Ballet's educational programs.) Glass lets people see what's going on inside, and gently assuages the notion that ballet can be a tad intimidating to the uninitiated. Termeer deployed the same architectural trick at the Kendall Square headquarters of Genzyme, the biotech firm he's built into a global juggernaut in an industry that for many is as mystifying as pirouettes and pas de chat. Which is why for all the hype and fawning prognostications about how the life sciences will someday become an economic powerhouse, it's gone somewhat unnoticed that his company is already a major force, a $3.8-billion-a-year business with 82 offices spread across 42 countries. (Some people have caught on, though: Governor Deval Patrick has struck up a helpful friendship with Termeer, whom he recently appointed to his council of economic advisers. He also hosted the Termeers for dinner this spring.)

Over the past three years, Termeer has earned more than $50 million in total compensation, and thanks to the performance of Genzyme's stock, his stake in the company is now worth about $260 million. It's a fortune that the future ballerinas of the North Shore are no doubt thrilled he's sharing—though their gratitude should extend to his wife, Belinda, since it's under her tutelage that the 62-year-old, Dutch-born Termeer has become a devoted dance fan.

Notwithstanding the nudge from his wife, Termeer has embraced the art for reasons all his own. "I'm drawn to the complete zero tolerance for screwups," he says in an accent that turns th's to d's and s's to z's. "Failure is so visible and the tolerance for anything that doesn't quite work isn't there. I like perfection and courage and innovation." Then he pauses, long enough to make you realize he's talking about more than just ballet. "I like, well, I like being judged."

The biotech tycoon sells the world's most expensive drug. It's called Cerezyme and for those unlucky enough to need it, it can cost $300,000 a year. Once every two weeks, patients with an affliction called Gaucher's disease are given the drug intravenously to provide them with an enzyme their bodies can't produce. Without the treatment, fatty material would collect in their liver, and their spleen, and in the marrow of their bones, and their organs would swell to an excruciating size. You've never heard of Gaucher's because only about 5,000 people are stricken with it—which is also why you probably weren't aware that the world's most expensive drug is manufactured in Genzyme's plant along Storrow Drive in Allston.

Though Genzyme sells Cerezyme to only a few thousand people, last year the company sold more than $1 billion of it, a haul that makes a mockery of the seemingly rock-solid principle that says drug companies get rich by selling to millions of people. Indeed, the bounty Genzyme has earned treating Gaucher's disease has, since the FDA first approved the therapy in 1991, been the engine driving everything that Genzyme has done as it's diversified into a healthcare giant that now turns out 15 other products. Even putting aside for a moment the fact that the business model upon which it's based is an affront to industry norms, almost anybody who knows anything about Cerezyme agrees the drug shouldn't even exist. That's excluding, of course, Termeer, who had the unusual sense to think that it could—and the singular skills to make it so.