So, This Is What a Biotech Tycoon Looks Like

The biotech tycoon figures he gets only one shot. Despite the empire he's built and the 25 years he's spent running it, Termeer worries about Genzyme's independence. This is nothing new. Even when the business was young and cash-strapped, Termeer zealously guarded against raising money by partnering with other firms. "We had a sense of what we wanted to do, and we wanted to do it ourselves," he says. "This was important." And it still is. Tether yourself to somebody else's bottom line, Termeer says, and you lose your ability to create drugs that shouldn't exist, to throw up factories before what they're meant to produce has been given the regulators' blessing, to take the leaps that are the reason you're not selling shoes for a living.

Late last year, when the notorious corporate raider Carl Icahn reported he had bought a stake in Genzyme, analysts began to wonder if a takeover was brewing. Termeer's contract stipulates that he is to receive a roughly $25 million golden parachute should he lose his job through such a deal. But rather than roll over, he loudly protested the imagined sale, telling investors that Genzyme had big plans—its own plans—and Icahn unloaded his shares a few weeks later.

The incident was the latest to draw out Termeer's insistence on control, an obsession that helps explain his longevity: He runs the place like it's his own, ever aware that amid the scrutiny he's accepted, a slip-up or a failed bet could be perilous. "The moment we don't deliver something that's essential to patients, the moment we start to falter, that's the moment we shouldn't be here," he says. "That's the moment we should put what we do into somebody else's hands."

He sits up in his soft blue chair and leans in toward the coffee table between us, his eyes alight with sincerity and urgency. "When we decide to do less risky things, when we decide to take on small problems so that we can be sure they'll work, that's the signal that we're losing our edge. We may still be a good economic enterprise, but I think we lose our right to exist."