Published by
The San Diego Union-Tribune
The San Diego Union-Tribune
SAN DIEGO — Richard Lerner, the masterful biochemist who guided Scripps Research on its way to becoming an elite center for biomedical science and helped develop Humira, the highest-selling therapeutic drug in the world last year, died on Dec. 2. He was 83. The private, nonprofit institute told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Lerner died of cancer at his home in La Jolla. The news comes at an eventful moment for Scripps, where Lerner nearly tripled the size of the institute during his 24 years as president, partly through ties with the pharmaceutical industry that helped produce Humira, which…