Vivek Ramaswamy’s brashness made waves in the Republican debate. He did the same in biotech

The youngest candidate on Wednesday night’s debate stage didn’t make any friends among his fellow Republican presidential hopefuls, questioning their morality, mocking their promises, and suggesting that he, by virtue of his inexperience in government, was ideally suited to solve a nation’s problems.

For Vivek Ramaswamy, it was familiar territory.

Long before he was explaining perestroika to Mike Pence and congratulating Nikki Haley on a future career in the defense industry, Ramaswamy brought a similar brashness to biotech. In 2015, he was a 29-year-old hedge fund manager, fresh out of Yale Law School, lecturing the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry on how it was going about the business of drug development all wrong.

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