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...Wasilla for a meeting with its mayor, Sarah Palin. Heyworth, a local Democratic activist, had grown tired of waiting for the Big Three oil companies to tap their huge natural-gas reserves in the state's North Slope, the long swatch of northern Alaska tundra that includes the largest oil and gas fields in North America. For decades, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and British Petroleum had little incentive to sell the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that shares space beneath the ice with all those oil deposits. Gas is less profitable than oil and much harder to move to market...
...pressure tactics prevailed. The Republican legislature passed a measure giving TransCanada up to $500 million in seed money. Alaskans had been talking about a gas pipeline for three decades, and in less than two years in office, Palin had made almost unbelievable headway. "I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history," she told the convention audience in September. "And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly $40 billion natural-gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence...
...Roche, the rush to innovate is palpable across the world's fifth largest pharmaceutical firm. In core research areas, scientists are mining new sources for inspiration, be it China or genetic engineering. At the same time, Roche's bosses, from their base in Basel, continue to lead the pack in acquiring expertise, a talent recently seen in the company's bid to control biotech superstar Genentech. Together, the two strategies form the nucleus of how Roche plans to deliver best-in-class products--faster, more cheaply and more reliably--to market. "The days of an attrition-based pipeline are over...
Roche's risk profile has also extended to being one of the largest investors in a red-hot area of drug research: ribonucleic-acid-mediated interference, or RNAi for short. First identified a decade ago, RNAi is a mechanism that exists naturally within all cells. Its discovery offered scientists one of the first clues into how genes can be turned on and off. And since many diseases are caused by a malfunction of specific genes, the ability to control their expression through RNAi has enormous therapeutic potential. "As soon as we identify what gene to target, our pipeline could...
...people with bad credit. In 1998, Green Tree was bought by Conseco for a hefty $7.6 billion; by 2002, Conseco had declared bankruptcy. "Green Tree was a house of cards, built on financial engineering that could not withstand the test of time," write the authors. It was the third largest bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time--one that now looks puny by comparison with today's debacles...