At WashU Medicine: 1966-1975
Chair, Department of Biological Chemistry and founder of Medical Scientist Training Program
P. Roy Vagelos, MD, has built a legacy few can match — spanning scientific discovery, business innovation and ethical leadership that’s transformed lives worldwide.
At WashU Medicine, he founded the Medical Scientist Training Program and the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences (DBBS), WashU’s PhD training program. Vagelos later spent 19 years in the pharmaceutical industry — first as president of Merck Research Laboratories, then as CEO and chairman — carrying forward the commitment to scientific rigor first instilled at WashU Medicine.
At Merck, he revolutionized drug discovery by moving beyond trial-and-error methods to a strategy grounded in biochemistry — targeting enzymes, receptors and ion channels to develop more effective therapies. This approach fueled a golden era of innovation, producing breakthrough drugs like the statins Mevacor and Zocor, the heart failure drug Vasotec and the M-M-R®II vaccine. Under Vagelos’ leadership, Merck became the industry’s leading biopharmaceutical company, and throughout, he maintained that science — not profit — must guide discovery.
Vagelos’ ethical standards earned admiration from researchers and Wall Street. In 1987, he set a global precedent for corporate responsibility when Merck announced it would donate ivermectin (Mectizan) free and indefinitely to combat river blindness, a debilitating parasitic disease common in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America. This led to the creation of the Mectizan Donation Program, which has helped eliminate the disease in multiple countries.
Vagelos proved that great science, ethical leadership and global impact go hand in hand. As WashU Medicine Dean David H. Perlmutter, MD, notes, “He became the world’s most shining example of what you can do in a physician-scientist career.”
Published in the Autumn 2025 issue