It was one of the most celebrated insider-trading scandals of the last decade, sending Martha Stewart and her Merrill Lynch stock broker to prison, along with the chairman of a highflying biotechnology company whose social climbing had made him a boldface name.

Now, it turns out, if they only had been more patient investors, they might have done just fine, and avoided jail time.

In a strange twist, ImClone Systems  the biotechnology company whose stock was dumped just before bad news was announced about an experimental cancer drug  has received a multibillion-dollar takeover bid pegged to the success of that very same drug.

And as it happens, ImClone’s former chairman, Samuel D. Waksal, is expected to leave federal prison shortly after serving about five years of his seven-year sentence, according to his brother, Harlan.