The wonderer: Pilot Therapeutics' odyssey leads a scientist to discover there's more--and less--to business than he thought.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin

Staring out from a Web page in a tight T-shirt with his muscular arms crossed, Floyd "Ski" Chilton might pass for a biker but for the lack of menace in his eyes. In fact, he is a 49-year-old biochemist, an authority on the effects of fatty acids on human health. A scientist with some 60 patents who runs a National Institutes of Health research project from his base at Wake Forest University Medical School, he is a crusader for his vision of how to fix the American diet, with an advice book in print and another in the works.

But around Winston-Salem, he is best known--not always fondly--as a businessman. Nine years ago, he used his research to start Pilot Therapeutics Inc., a company that promised to launch the Twin City into the forefront of biotechnology. He envisioned hundreds of workers developing, perfecting, manufacturing and distributing what are called medical foods. The scheme touched off a bidding war between the Carolinas. Chilton followed the money to Charleston, only to burn through millions in seed capital from public and private sources. He ran out of cash before he got a product to market. In late 2003, he shuttered the business and, early the next year, limped back to Winston-Salem and Wake Forest, adopting a profile so low that many of his backers had no idea what had become of him.

It was the end of Pilot Therapeutics--or so many thought. But Chilton had only induced a coma, with the company retaining rights to key patents and products under development. In November, he shocked the business back to life with an announcement that Pilot had inked a deal with a Boulder, Colo.-based company that would make and market its medical foods to treat allergies, asthma and eczema. Efficas Inc. has started selling products based on Chilton's science on its Web site. If they catch on, it hopes to sell them in stores.

Pilot now has its first operating cash flow, and Chilton is cautiously trying to reconstitute the company. Whether Pilot will have better luck this time is another question. He plans to concentrate on the science and leave the business to managers. Looking back on its disastrous first run, he says, "I was simply an entrepreneur trying to survive."

That he became a scientist and author is itself a testament to his perseverance. Chilton grew up in Pilot Mountain, the dyslexic son of a tobacco farmer, forced to cope in an age when few understood his malady. In sixth grade, teachers put him in special-education classes. Through will and effort, he worked his way back into the mainstream. "That type of thing can either destroy you or do something else. For me it did something else. I have spent my whole life trying not to be put back into that class again, driven by fear of that."

He had a knack for science and a basic understanding of business, thanks to his father. When he was in high school, his dad gave him a small stake to trade stock. They would compete for best gains. Later, his father turned over a two-acre plot of tobacco, which Chilton worked and harvested to pay for college. The irony is not lost on a man whose career is based on promoting health. "I see nothing good about tobacco. But we are born where we are born."

After graduating from Western Carolina in 1980 with a bachelor's in biology and chemistry, he enrolled at Wake Forest, completing his doctorate in biochemistry in 1984. His thesis was on the inflammatory response, the biological defense the body uses to fight infection and other assaults. A little inflammation at the right time is a good thing. But when the body doesn't know when to turn it off, bad things happen, such as arthritis, asthma and allergies.

His thesis...