[1][2] He graduated from Reed College and earned his MD and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1979.
He did his clinical training in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and University of California, San Francisco.
At the time, Perlmutter was not chosen to replace Edward Scolnik as president of Merck Research Laboratories; that position went instead to Peter S. Kim, previously of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2001, Perlmutter left Merck and joined Amgen as the executive vice president and head of R&D from January 2001 to February 2012.
He also serves on the boards of the Institute for Systems Biology and StemCells Inc [11] and is a science partner at The Column Group, a venture capital fund focused on biotechnology.