After Belippa went public in early 2000, Patrick became a multimillionaire overnight. Over the next several years, Belippa expanded, employing over three hundred and fifty people, with a pipeline of profitable drugs released each year.

By 2007, Bill had moved up the ladder at Netflix. He was VP of Sales. But he wasn’t sure about this new direction the company was headed in—a streaming service—and he cashed in his stock options while they still had a shred of value.

As Bill watched Netflix’s streaming service revolutionize the entertainment industry and the stock options he’d once owned skyrocket in value, he found himself self-medicating. First it was booze, then pills. After Martha filed for divorce in 2011, Bill hit rock bottom.

A horrible phone call from his old friend Patrick forced Bill to reevaluate his life. Trisha had terminal cancer. She died seven months later, and it was at her memorial that Patrick offered Bill a job with Belippa. He said he was going to step away as CEO, but he wanted someone involved in the day-to-day whom he could trust.

Because of Patrick, Bill had always kept a close eye on the pharmaceutical industry. He quickly moved up the ranks to the same position he’d once held at Netflix. He would always be the man who threw away a fortune in stock options, but at Belippa he was getting a second chance to make his mark.

It wasn’t long before Bill was acting CFO. He spearheaded a movement to raise prices on all Belippa drugs across the board—as much as 400 percent in some cases. The move worked, insurance companies paid, and revenues soared.

In 2015 the active CEO was accused of sexual harassment and resigned. Two days later, Bill Wyeth was unanimously installed as CEO.

A troupe of howler monkeys moving through the canopy snapped Bill from his reverie. He reached down and grabbed his daypack. He pulled out a paperback book and thumbed the cover. The book was titled The Last Shaman: Searching for New Medicines in the Amazon.

The book was written by Martin J. Lefbrevor, PhD—the same man who, when asked just minutes earlier by Patrick what kind of car he drove, had answered, “An ’81 Chevy Caprice.”

The ethnobotanist—who was born in Calgary in 1956 and was considered one of the leading authorities on Amazonian botany—was fluent in six indigenous languages and had spent twelve years bouncing around South America, studying with different tribal groups and their healers, learning their therapeutic knowledge of the local flora.

Bill opened the book and found the passage he’d highlighted in bright yellow:

There are countless “Wonder Drugs” just waiting to be discovered in the Amazon rainforest and it’s only a matter of time before big drug companies isolate and synthesize these compounds for commercial purposes. The result would be patents worth billions of dollars in profit; and in the case of the cure for cancer, trillions of dollars in profit.