“When Kris came to me in early 2012 with this idea of vagus nerve stimulation,” Slaoui told me, “I was like: C’mon? You’re gonna give a shock and it changes the immune system? I was very skeptical. But finally I agreed to visit Kevin’s lab. I wanted the data, the evidence. I don’t like hot air.” He went to Tak, the lead scientist for the trials. “I asked him, ‘Paul-Peter, is it really real?’ ”

After getting an endorsement from Tak, who is now Glaxo’s global head of immuno-inflammation research, Slaoui committed to financing SetPoint. The investment was modest, though, because he felt that Tracey’s device was “just a starting point. It was still very broad — you touch the vagus nerve, you touch most of your viscera. We had wanted something very specific.” What he didn’t want was “the bulldozer approach” that characterizes already existing stimulators for treating Parkinson’s, chronic pain and epilepsy. (Pacemakers differ because they stimulate muscle, not nerves.) These devices are indiscriminate, blasting electricity into billions of neurons and hoping for the best. As Slaoui saw it, SetPoint’s stimulator was a primitive forerunner to “a device that reads your electrical impulses and sees when something is wrong, then corrects what needs correcting.”

In 2006, Slaoui continued, “when I became chairman of R. & D., R. & D. was a liability to this company. We were spending lots of money and not producing new molecules for new medicines. I had to acknowledge that the current way of doing R. & D. wasn’t likely to be successful.” Four years later, Slaoui put together a 14-member think tank and discussed, among other topics, the Human Brain Project. The multinational endeavor, directed by the neuroscientist and Fulbright scholar Henry Markram, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is trying to create a computer simulation of the human brain. That got Slaoui “thinking about electrical signaling, an opportunity to make medicine — a therapeutic intervention — that’s super highly specific in terms of its geographic position. I’m going to go to the nerve that goes to your kidney and nowhere else, and only to your left kidney, and to a particular area of the left kidney.”

That degree of precision would address one of Slaoui’s major criticisms of conventional drugs: They flood the body, and then doctors have to hope that they will perform only where they’re supposed to. “It is really difficult to design a molecule that will only interact where you want it, because it goes everywhere.” The upshot, usually: side effects. Bioelectronics could potentially eliminate those, as well as the costly redundancy involved in the drug-discovery process, in which every promising molecule must be independently evaluated. “There is very little that is transposable from one molecule to the next,” Slaoui said. “You have to redo everything.” Bioelectronics attracted him, he says, because “95 percent of the hardware is the same,” no matter what disease it treats.

So Slaoui found himself working for a drug company while devoting himself to the idea of treating illness without drugs. In July 2012, he and Famm toured Markram’s facilities in Lausanne. There Markram showed them a 3-D digital visualization on a giant screen of 100,000 synapses actively firing in a mouse brain.