HIV Hail Mary

Medical database billionaire TERRY RAGON believes he can succeed where major governments have failed: by bringing together top doctors, scientists and engineers in a moon-shot bid to cure one of the world's wiliest viruses.

- Katie Jennings

It's opening day at the Ragon Institute's new building, a sparkling 323,000-square-foot glass-and-steel edifice on Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Governor Maura Healey, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and presidents past and present of MIT, Harvard and Mass General Brigham are sipping lemon spritzers and nibbling hors d'oeuvres. A choir of a dozen scientists and staffers starts singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Everyone is here to toast Phillip "Terry" Ragon, the billionaire founder of software company InterSystems, and his wife, Susan, also an executive at the firm. The Ragons have donated $400 million for research to harness the immune system to fight disease. Soon, instead of singing, these same scientists will be running experiments on gleaming white-and-silver lab benches in a bid to cure one of the world's most elusive viruses: HIV.

"We started to evolve this whole idea of a Manhattan Project on HIV," says Ragon, 74, in a rare interview, referring to America's massive R&D program to build the first atomic bomb during the Second World War. "If you tried to do the Manhattan Project back during World War I, you would have failed because we didn't know about quantum mechanics. If you waited until World War III, you'd have been too late."

Ragon, who is the sole owner of InterSystems and is worth an estimated $3.1 billion, believes-despite all good evidence to the contrary-that we are on the cusp of a similar scientific breakthrough when it comes to curing the estimated 39 million people worldwide living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.