'Here is a staggering fact," marvels John Lechleiter, the CEO and chairman of the drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. "In 1960 the average life expectancy in East Asia was 39. Thirty-nine! In 1990, 30 years later, it was 67. Think about that. Does that explain the Asian economic boom? I think it might go a long way."
Longer, healthier, more productive lives, and more of them; more workers; an expanding middle class; more opportunities for the formation of capital—this virtuous medical-economic cycle, as Mr. Lechleiter sees it, is helping to generate the equally staggering growth in China and elsewhere in the region. "Wealth follows health, and it ain't the other way around," he says earlier this week, as the dawn catches the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses here in his office atop Lilly's sprawling research campus.
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