Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech
by Sally Smith Hughes
Copyright PROLOGUE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 INVENTING RECOMBINANT DNA TECHNOLOGY Two Scientists on Converging Paths The Collaboration Patenting and Politics Steps toward Commercialization 2 CREATING GENENTECH Bob Swanson Founding Genentech Legal and Political Obstacles A Full Business Plan 3 PROVING THE TECHNOLOGY A Portentous Experiment Switching Targets Negotiating Research Agreements Making Somatostatin Wider
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Strategies Interferon: The New Wonder Drug? Run-Up to an Initial Public Offering Legal Impediments The IPO EPILOGUE Notes Bibliography Oral History Bibliography Index Prologue Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech is the story of a pioneering geneticengineering company that inspired a new industrial sector, transforming the biomedical and commercial landscapes
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, pending government regulation and adverse public opinion threatened substantial interference. Swanson and Boyer had to devise corporate structure and erect intellectual property protection, giving Genentech a chance to compete against far larger and well-established companies with vastly deeper pockets. He needed to somehow balance a freewheeling, university-like culture
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also navigate federal guidelines for recombinant DNA research, face the threat of restrictive legislation, and run the gauntlet of legal unknowns in patenting living things. Genentech’s future rested on technological innovation, business acumen, human dedication, and a freewheeling, can-do culture strikingly different from anything the pharmaceutical industry offered.
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at what they were witnessing, the company confirmed that genetic engineering could build a business, attract major money, and promise lifesaving pharmaceuticals as well. Genentech’s spectacular success launched a period of speculative frenzy over biotechnology as a revolutionary approach for creating novel products, generating incalculable profits, and fashioning a
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did not intend to employ the allegedly dangerous organisms subject to the pending NIH guidelines: “None of the [NIH-]prohibited experimentation will effect [sic] Genentech’s work.” “Genentech’s engineering,” the document continued, “will be done in facilities equivalent to medium to low ranges of [biosafety] containment, well within the standard university
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and lows, the pharmaceutical industry monitored recombinant DNA science and politics with a combination of fascination and skepticism. That skepticism began to fade somewhat with Genentech’s making of somatostatin. Perhaps this radical and disruptive technology, corporate boards began to consider, could indeed be commercially productive. The title of a
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impatiently endured the somatostatin project, with its heart-stopping low point and exhilarating finish. It served handsomely as a convincing proof-of-principle demonstration of Genentech’s core technology, reducing technical uncertainties and pointing toward a sweeping landscape of industrial possibilities. After the somatostatin success, the company could move on
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government policy also figured in the company’s success. Because the original NIH guidelines applied only to recombinant experiments funded by the federal government, Genentech’s privately funded research was technically exempt. Furthermore, the 1976 guidelines concerned natural and complementary DNA and contained no explicit reference to chemically synthesized
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. For an upfront licensing fee of $500,000, Lilly got what it wanted: exclusive worldwide rights to manufacture and market human insulin using Genentech’s technology. Genentech was to receive 6 percent royalties and City of Hope 2 percent royalties on product sales.57 For a firm barely off the ground
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field advanced, making commercial biotechnology the most intricately intertwined with university research of any industrial sector.69 The big company–small company template that Genentech and Lilly promulgated in molecular biology would become a prominent organizational form in a coming biotechnology industry.70 PUBLICITY AND EXPANSION Swanson, hell-bent
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investment bankers, academic scientists, attorneys, and accountants.92 The array of guests foretold the major participants in the new field of commercial biotechnology. For Genentech, the consequences of making human insulin and partnering with Eli Lilly were substantial and far-reaching. The two achievements, broadly interpreted as decisive scientific and
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corporation of Lilly’s stature considered recombinant DNA technology of sufficient industrial potential to warrant forming an R&D partnership with an insignificant start-up. Genentech’s alliance with the pharmaceutical giant enormously magnified its visibility and boosted its chances of future financing and corporate contracts. As Middleton later observed:
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phase in which the research direction and cultural norms of American biomedicine would be realigned to more utilitarian ends and proprietary considerations. In this reorientation, Genentech was already having a noticeable effect. Human Growth Hormone: Shaping a Commercial Future The laboratory production of human growth hormone is . . . probably most significant
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scientists banded together into flexible multidisciplinary teams that exhibited inexhaustible engagement, camaraderie, and a willingness to pull together to reach common ends. Heyneker contrasted Genentech’s evident teamwork with academia’s bias toward rewarding individual endeavor: In academe, the motivation is quite different. Graduate students are there to get
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to the company than celebrated scientific achievement and expected market bonanza. Making interferon with its projected billion-dollar market would provide a launching pad for Genentech to go public. Much obviously rode on the project’s success. However, making recombinant interferon presented exceptional problems. Goeddel recalled discussions characterizing it as
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significant departure from conventional business practice. A few abruptly changed their business plans. The Economist predicted—correctly, it turned out—that the lively action in Genentech stock would “whet appetites for other glamorous share offerings expected soon.”112 Appetites were indeed whetted. Investors were reported to be “positively salivating” over
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sudden change of heart; they precipitously dropped the previous timetable and rushed out plans for a March 1981 IPO. Perkins noted the fertile seeds Genentech had sown: “[Genentech’s IPO] established the idea that you could start a new biotechnology company, raise obscene amounts of money, hire good employees, sell stock
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go-for-broke culture—an electric distillation of individual high energy, creativity, competitiveness, and hubris—not only helped to keep scientists and managers coming to Genentech but also counted as a significant ingredient and treasured asset. Swanson’s unflagging insistence on product focus and fiscal responsibility kept industrially inexperienced scientists supported
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fickle and short-term, regulatory agencies more demanding than expected, litigation commonplace and costly, and public policy and the economic climate fluctuating and undependable. Genentech itself foundered in the mid-1980s, undergoing profound financial problems and difficult transitions at the executive level. Swanson was forced out, Kirk Raab stepped up
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numerous practical social benefits, worrying ethical concerns, and profound cultural and attitudinal changes that society continues to both welcome and debate. In the decades ahead, Genentech would misstep, suffer failed projects, over-promote products, endure bad press, see its libertine culture tamed, and undergo the challenges of corporate expansion, fierce
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. 20Ibid., 10. 21Ibid., 13. 22Quoted in Rothenberg 1984, 370. 23Robert Swanson, “Stanford Speech,” draft of speech accepting an Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award to Genentech, Stanford Business School, 1983, Swanson’s office correspondence, K & E Management, San Mateo, California. 24Swanson oral history, 1996/1997, 16. 25Swanson, “Stanford Speech.” 26Ibid.
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research, December 2, 1977, UCSF News Services/Publications, University of California, San Francisco. 2Herbert Boyer, “The Business,” symposium paper, “The Emergence of Biotechnology: DNA to Genentech,” Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, June 13, 1997, 80–92. 3Greene et al. 1975; Howard M. Goodman, associate professor of biochemistry, and Herbert W. Boyer,
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. 35Kehoe 1979, 86. 36Martial et al. 1979. 37“First Successful Bacterial Production of Human Growth Hormone Announced,” for release July 11, 1979, Corporate Communications, Genentech, Inc. 38For the timing of the various announcements, see Saltus 1979. 39“First Successful Bacterial Production of Human Growth Hormone Announced.” 40Gonzalez 1979, 701. 41John
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what John Lesch and others have termed the industrialization of pharmaceutical innovation. Lesch 2007. 54Boyer, “The Business,” unpublished presentation, “The Emergence of Biotechnology: DNA to Genentech” symposium, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA, June 13, 1997, 80–92. 55Kleid oral history, 2001/2002, 97–99. 56Quoted in “Gene-Splicing Factory
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1983, Swanson’s office correspondence, K&E Management, San Mateo, CA. 98Fred A. Middleton to Bob Swanson, April 6, 1979, Chief Financial Officer files, Genentech, Inc. 99Swanson, “Genentech—A Commercial Record of Achievement in Molecular Biology.” 100 Goeddel, e-mail to author, April 14, 2009. 101 Packard 1995, 27. For earlier theories
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MC 100, box X. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ———.1994. Recombinant DNA Research at UCSF and Commercial Applications at Genentech. An oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2001. ———. 2000. Interview by Sally Hughes
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by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2003. Gower, James M. 2004. Business Development and Marketing Strategy at Genentech, 1982–1992. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2006. Heyneker, Herbert L. 2002.
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Molecular Geneticist at UCSF and Genentech, Entrepreneur in Biotechnology. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2004. Itakura, Keiichi. 2005.
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Biotechnology. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkley, 2006. Kiley, Thomas D. 2000/2001. Genentech Legal Counsel and Vice President, 1976–1988, and Entrepreneur. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California
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, Berkeley, 2002. Kleid, Dennis G. 2001/2002. Scientist and Patent Agent at Genentech. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2002. Kornberg, Arthur. 1997. Biochemistry at Stanford,
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conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1998. Lasky, Laurence. 2003. Vaccine and Adhesion Molecule Research at Genentech. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2005. Middleton, Fred A. 2001. First Chief
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Financial Officer at Genentech, 1978–1984. Oral history conducted by Glenn Bugos for the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2002. Penhoet, Edward E.
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history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2001. Pennica, Diane. 2003. TPA and Other Contributions at Genentech. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2004. Perkins, Thomas J. 2001. Kleiner Perkins,
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Venture Capital, and the Chairmanship of Genentech, 1976–1999. Oral history conducted by Glenn E. Bugos, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2002. ———. 2009, 2010. Early Bay
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conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, 1998. Riggs, Arthur. 2005. City of Hope’s Contributions to Early Genentech Research. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2006. Rutter, William J. 1992. The
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Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1998. Scheller, Richard. 2001/2002. Conducting Research in Academia, Directing Research at Genentech. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2002. Swanson, Robert A. 1996/1997. Co-
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by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2001. Ullrich, Axel. 1994/2003. Molecular Biologist at UCSF and Genentech. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2006. Yansura, Daniel G. 2001–2. Senior
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Scientist at Genentech. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2002. Young, William D. 2004. Director of
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Manufacturing at Genentech. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, 2006. Index Page numbers in italic type refer to
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80–81, 82, 89, 93, 103 UCSF projects, 77, 87, 93 Integrated Genetics, Inc., 161 Intel Corporation, 189n116 intellectual property protection. See patenting interferon, 127 Genentech project, 134, 142–46 sales, 146 subtypes of, 142 volumes produced, 145 International Industrial Development, 184n92 International Nickel, 105, 178n31 Intervet, 187n69 Itakura, Keiichi, 50
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin · 7 Nov 2017 · 615pp · 168,775 words
years. In the space of thirty-five miles and seven years, innovators developed the microprocessor, the personal computer, and recombinant DNA. Entrepreneurs founded Apple, Atari, Genentech, and the pioneering venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Five major industries were born: personal computing, video games, advanced semiconductor
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Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Sandra Kurtzig, an early software entrepreneur, was the first woman to take a technology company public. Bob Swanson cofounded Genentech. Al Alcorn designed the first wildly successful video game, Atari’s Pong. Fawn Alvarez rose from an assembler on a factory line to the executive
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, with Bill Hambrecht, the investment bank Hambrecht & Quist. Hambrecht and Quist took Tymshare public in 1970 and would do the same for Apple and Genentech in 1980, Adobe in 1986, and Google in 2004 (among many other companies).29 Larry Sonsini, the attorney who helped take Tymshare public, was
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funding later generations. Between them, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner & Perkins would go on to fund, among others, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dropbox, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Genentech, Google, Instagram, Intuit, and LinkedIn–and that is just the first half of the alphabet. One key to Valentine’s success as a venture capitalist
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offer a generous stock option plan. Boyer agreed but told him that money alone would not be enough to attract and keep top scientists. Genentech would also need to allow the researchers to publish their findings—a suggestion to which Swanson assented, with the stipulation that patent applications be filed
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before papers were published. Boyer also suggested that his coinventor Stan Cohen from Stanford join Genentech. Cohen declined. He served as a consultant to Cetus and feared that more substantial corporate involvement would taint his credibility when he spoke about
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plan. After a brief six-month period during which the company would negotiate licenses from Stanford and the University of California and recruit scientists, Genentech would rent and outfit a lab and hire a microbiologist and two organic chemists to staff it. Eighteen months and a half million dollars later
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costs low by subcontracting the experiments somehow? A few days later, Swanson came back to Perkins with a new plan developed in consultation with Boyer. Genentech would not hire scientists (or anyone else; Swanson was the company’s sole employee for months), nor would it rent and outfit a laboratory.
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up-front risk. Only if a sponsored research team managed to engineer a human hormone—thereby affirmatively answering Perkins’s question about divine cooperation—would Genentech raise more money (at a higher valuation) and try to move into large-scale production.56 If the engineering effort did not succeed, the
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& Perkins would invest $100,000—among the smallest investments in the venture capitalists’ first fund. (Only two of the twelve companies invested in before Genentech had a smaller initial investment.)57 Swanson, in return, drove a tough deal with the man who had fired him and refused his plea to
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. Swanson, who would occasionally come down to campus, kept Reimers apprised of everything from industry gossip to pending legislation, and Reimers made sure that Genentech was always on the list of companies receiving drafts of Reimers’s evolving plans for a nonexclusive license.66 The two men recognized that they
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of paperwork that piled up every week.82 * * * I. Swanson was playing a game of hypotheticals: if Stanford received the patent, Swanson wanted Genentech, and only Genentech, to be able to use the Cohen-Boyer process to make insulin and other hormones. II. The other big winner was Tandem. Although eight
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never mentioned that Swanson had left the venture firm, much less that he was fired. Instead, Perkins drew a direct analogy between Tandem Computers and Genentech, saying that “Bob [Swanson] enabled us to use the Tandem formula again, of spinning out a venture directly from the partnership.” Swanson, by contrast,
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“No. They had let me go.” VI. The apartment was at 2275 Broadway, and the roommate was Swanson’s Sigma Chi fraternity brother (and future Genentech CFO) Fred Middleton. Venture capitalist Brook Byers was Swanson’s second roommate. VII. Tandem was the company founded by Jimmy Treybig, the former Hewlett-Packard
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supplied small batches of the hormone to large pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly. These companies would manufacture the hormone in volume and sell it. Genentech was profitable, though barely. It employed more than one hundred full-time employees (more than one-third of them with PhDs), who worked in
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’s tepid efforts to raise money by selling itself to Lilly or Johnson & Johnson had failed. Perkins believed that a public offering would give Genentech the opportunity to set the template for this new industry, recently christened “biotech.”XI A successful IPO would also provide a profitable exit for his
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shaken the mad-scientist reputation that had shadowed its earliest years, but overall, the public had become less fearful and more admiring of biotechnology. Genentech had hired Regis McKenna to help explain and promote the new technology, and whether due to his influence or simply the passage of time, the
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A few large companies that could imagine using genetic engineering in their products had even invested in several young biotech companies.X Perkins believed that Genentech had everything it needed to go public: profits, a product, big-name customers, and public approval. Moreover, he warned Swanson and Boyer, if another,
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offering. Eugene Kleiner asked Alfred “Bud” Coyle, a partner at New York’s Blyth Eastman Paine Webber, to come out of retirement for the Genentech offering. Here, as had been and would be the case so many other times in Silicon Valley, connections forged among an earlier generation of entrepreneurs
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decided to leave their Nobel Prize–winning boss and launch a competitor company—had been revolutionary. Kleiner knew that Coyle was a risk taker. The Genentech offering was similarly radical. “It was science, it was hardly profitable, and it had essentially no revenue,” says Brook Byers, Swanson’s former apartment
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mate who joined Kleiner & Perkins (now Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) in 1972. Genentech, attempting to be the first new pharmaceutical business launched in many years, would compete against established giants. Without Coyle behind the offering, Byers muses, “no
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certain targets: $1 million profits, $10 million in revenues, five years of profitability. Those were the same metrics that had made Swanson hesitant to take Genentech public. Farinon demanded, “Who set up those rules?” “I don’t know. They’re just the rules,” Hambrecht said, Farinon was indignant. “Those goddamn
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public?”10 That challenge became the credo of Hambrecht & Quist. By the time Perkins called Hambrecht to see if he might be interested in taking Genentech public, Hambrecht & Quist, after struggling through several rough years, was a success. The bank had four senior managing partners and twelve general partners.11
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Hambrecht reviewed Genentech’s financials and agreed to join a tour of the company’s facility. He listened to the explanations of the cooling and warming rooms, visited
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could have given any part of them. But the men stuck with the script. CFO Fred Middleton ran through the financials, pointing out that Genentech had been the first to synthesize human insulin and was profitable. Boyer talked about the science behind recombinant DNA, using a string of brightly colored
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company, he knew how to wheedle, badger and cajole the scientific staff, armed with “just enough [science] to be annoying,” as one Genentech researcher put it. Genentech’s scientists hardly lacked motivation, however. Dave Goeddel, who headed the successful push to be the first to make human insulin, liked to say
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.17 But many more disagreed. A dozen biotech companies, all of them with scientists in key roles, went public in the two years after Genentech’s IPO.18 Recombinant DNA, one chronicler has theorized, “pushed genetics from the realm of science into the realm of technology.”19 Venture capitalists
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knew how to build companies around technology. The morning of Genentech’s IPO, Perkins phoned Bob Swanson back in California and roused him from a sound sleep. “Bob,” he said to the drowsy young entrepreneur
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now that the patent had been issued, any company employing the technique needed to buy a license from the Office of Technology Licensing. That included Genentech, which used the process in developing its hormones. Reimers had to design a license that would accomplish two hard-to-reconcile ends: bring in
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take a deal now or take their chances later.33 Reimers sent drafts of the licensing terms to roughly a half-dozen companies, including Genentech.34 This gave important companies a first look, and their feedback gave Reimers a better understanding of what mattered to potential licensees.II Soon
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after receiving the draft terms, Genentech’s Bob Swanson, who had been in touch with Reimers since the month the company had launched, began petitioning for a custom license. Reimers
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* * I. Although Stanford did not hold an international patent, many foreign companies paid for licenses. II. Draft licensing agreements went to Eli Lilly and Company, Genentech, Hoffmann-La Roche, Schering-Plough, SmithKline & French, and Upjohn. Cetus and Monsanto may also have seen a draft. III. In March, Rowland had called it
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launched his engineering consultancy. He sent them to Larry Sonsini, the young attorney who had handled the Tymshare IPO and soon would begin working on Genentech’s. Sonsini, who continued to counsel the programmers, also introduced them to the venture capitalist Bill Draper, of Sutter Hill Ventures.VI Draper agreed
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, IPOs, and stock options were esoteric concepts outside of a small group of financiers and executives.8 (That would change within months, after the Genentech and Apple IPOs.) McMurtry found it plausible that Kurtzig was not familiar with venture capital, and he was impressed that she had wanted to meet
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of bad news—pollution, overcrowding, skyrocketing divorce rates and housing costs—Silicon Valley continued to capture the public’s imagination in 1983, three years after Genentech’s and Apple’s record-setting IPOs. In a regional equivalent of Hollywood’s “map of the stars” bus tours, enterprising guides offered driving
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technology from Xerox PARC, where Bechtolsheim had worked while in graduate school.4 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm that had launched Genentech and whose cofounders had worked at Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard, was an early and significant investor in Sun. Bechtolsheim had designed the workstation while a
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of California, San Francisco, inspired Niels Reimers to file for a patent on the recombinant DNA process on behalf of the two universities. Courtesy: Genentech Genentech cofounders Herb Boyer and Bob Swanson shortly after they launched the company. Courtesy: the National Institutes of Health Protestors interrupt a National Academy of Sciences
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. “Cohen-Boyer Royalties and Distribution FY 1979–80 Through FY 1998–1999,” SUOTL. 41. Reimers, ROHO interview. 42. Sally Smith Hughes pointed out that Genentech and other companies began using recombinant DNA technology even before the Cohen-Boyer patent was issued in 1980. Nonetheless, she added, the broad claims in
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to be a labor-saving machine that screened microorganisms (identifying ones with a resistance to antibiotics, for example). 24. Perkins, quoted in Sally Smith Hughes, Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 32. 25. David Arscott, interview by author, May 13, 2015. 26. Bob Swanson, ROHO
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ASM News 67, no. 11 (2001). 36. Manny Levinson, introduction to Bob Swanson, ROHO interview. 37. Brook Byers, ROHO interview. 38. Hughes, Genentech: 35. 39. Swanson, quoted in Hughes, Genentech: 37; Genentech S-1, Oct. 14, 1980. 40. Randall Rothenberg, “Robert A. Swanson, Chief Genetic Officer,” Esquire, December 1984. 41. Swanson, ROHO interview
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I don’t think that at the time he had a tremendous amount of confidence in Bob” (Middleton, ROHO interview). Regis McKenna, who worked with Genentech, has a “vague memory” that Swanson had approached him for advice on asking Perkins for an investment. Swanson, McKenna says, was concerned because he knew
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DNA,” July 15, 1976, SUOTL. 82. “Flashback to 1970,” recollection by Sally Hines, in 40 Years of Discovery, Office of Technology Licensing anniversary publication. Genentech held Friday-afternoon celebrations that they called Ho-hos. Tandem and ROLM were also renowned for their Friday-afternoon beer bashes. That Flips My Switch
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UC’s patent or used the genetic material in question.” http://www.gene.com/media/press-releases/4887/1999-11-19/university-of-california-and-genentech-s. 3. Bob Swanson, ROHO interview. 4. Fred Middleton, ROHO interview. 5. Brook Byers, interview by author, Oct. 8, 2015. 6. “Kleiner & Perkins, Venture
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Capital, and the Chairmanship of Genentech, 1976–1995,” oral history of Thomas J. Perkins, ROHO interview. Perkins had started a laser company that was acquired by Spectra-Physics, which H&Q
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8, 2015. 17. Kathy Christensen, “Gene Splicers Develop a Product: New Breed of Scientist-Tycoons,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 1980. 18. Sally Smith Hughes, Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 161. 19. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History (New York: Scribner, 2016): 234. 20
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. In their interviews with the author, both Reimers and Barnes recalled that, as Barnes put it, “At the eleventh hour, we were still sweating getting Genentech.” 49. Niels Reimers to Donald Kennedy, Jerry Lieberman, and William F. Massy, Dec. 17, 1981, SUOTL. Sitting in a Kiddie Seat — Al Alcorn 1.
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HarperCollins, 2000. House, Charles H., and Raymond L. Price. The HP Phenomenon Innovation and Business Transformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2009. Hughes, Sally Smith. Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ———. “Making Dollars Out of DNA.” Isis 92 (2001): 541–75. Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee · 16 Nov 2010 · 1,294pp · 210,361 words
been focused on dissecting the molecular mechanism of the neu oncogene. Her-2, in contrast, was discovered on the sprawling campus of the pharmaceutical company Genentech. The difference in venue, and the resulting difference in goals, would radically alter the fate of this gene. For Weinberg, neu had represented a
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route to understanding the fundamental biology of neuroblastoma. For Genentech, Her-2 represented a route to developing a new drug. Located on the southern edge of San Francisco, sandwiched among the powerhouse labs of Stanford
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, UCSF, and Berkeley and the burgeoning start-ups of Silicon Valley, Genentech—short for Genetic Engineering Technology—was born out of an idea imbued with deep alchemic symbolism. In the late 1970s, researchers at Stanford and UCSF
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bacteria, or a human protein synthesized in dog cells. Genes could also be spliced together to create new genes, creating proteins never found in nature. Genentech imagined leveraging this technology of genes to develop a pharmacopoeia of novel drugs. Founded in 1976, the company licensed recombinant DNA technology from UCSF, raised
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can be used to control diabetes. Growth hormone, made by the pituitary cells, augments growth by increasing the metabolism of muscle and bone cells. Before Genentech, protein drugs, although recognizably potent, had been notoriously difficult to produce. Insulin, for instance, was produced by grinding up cow and pig innards into
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into a bacterium, say, and use the bacterial cell as a bioreactor to produce vast quantities of that protein. The technology was transformative. In 1982, Genentech unveiled the first “recombinant” human insulin; in 1984, it produced a clotting factor used to control bleeding in patients with hemophilia; in 1985, it created
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hormone—all created by engineering the production of human proteins in bacterial or animal cells. By the late 1980s, though, after an astonishing growth spurt, Genentech ran out of existing drugs to mass-produce using recombinant technology. Its early victories, after all, had been the result of a process and not
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a product: the company had found a radical new way to produce old medicines. Now, as Genentech set out to invent new drugs from scratch, it was forced to change its winning strategy: it needed to find targets for drugs—proteins in
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insulin for diabetics, clotting factors for hemophiliacs, growth hormone for dwarfs. An oncogene was the opposite—not a missing signal, but a signal in overabundance. Genentech could fabricate a missing protein in bacterial cells, but it had yet to learn how to inactivate a hyperactive protein in a human cell. In
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the summer of 1986, while Genentech was still puzzling over a method to inactivate oncogenes, Ullrich presented a seminar at the University of California in Los Angeles. Flamboyant and exuberant,
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of Her-2, and the serendipitous convergence of that discovery with Weinberg’s prior work. But he left his listeners searching for a punch line. Genentech was a drug company. Where was the drug? Dennis Slamon, a UCLA oncologist, attended Ullrich’s talk that afternoon in 1986. The son of
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He needed a method to kill an oncogene. Slamon, hearing Ullrich’s story of Her-2, made a quick, intuitive connection. Ullrich had an oncogene; Genentech wanted a drug—but an intermediate was missing. A drug without a disease is a useless tool; to make a worthwhile cancer drug, both needed
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at UCLA, all saved in a vast freezer. Slamon proposed a simple collaboration. If Ullrich sent him the DNA probes for Her-2 from Genentech, Slamon could test his collection of cancer cells for samples with hyperactive Her-2—thus bridging the gap between the oncogene and a human cancer
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to kill. Her-2 amplification marked the tumors with the worst prognosis. Slamon’s data set off a chain reaction in Ullrich’s lab at Genentech. The association of Her-2 with a subtype of cancer—aggressive breast cancer—prompted an important experiment. What would happen, Ullrich wondered, if Her
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and Padhy had forgotten to perform. Ullrich knew where he might look for a drug to shut off Her-2 function. By the mid-1980s, Genentech had organized itself into an astonishing simulacrum of a university. The South San Francisco campus had departments, conferences, lectures, subgroups, even researchers in cutoff
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jeans playing Frisbee on the lawns. One afternoon, Ullrich walked to the Immunology Division at Genentech. The division specialized in the creation of immunological molecules. Ullrich wondered whether someone in immunology might be able to design a drug to bind Her
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2 expressing cancers. He had implanted these cancers into mice, where they had exploded into friable, metastatic tumors, recapitulating the aggressive human disease. In 1988, Genentech’s immunologists successfully produced a mouse antibody that bound and inactivated Her-2. Ullrich sent Slamon the first vials of the antibody, and Slamon launched
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targeted therapy for cancer: an oncogene, a form of cancer that specifically activated that oncogene, and a drug that specifically targeted it. Both expected Genentech to leap at the opportunity to produce a new protein drug to erase an oncogene’s hyperactive signal. But Ullrich, holed away in his lab
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with Her-2, had lost touch with the trajectory of the company outside the lab. Genentech, he now discovered, was abandoning its interest in cancer. Through the 1980s, as Ullrich and Slamon had been hunting for a target specific to
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had failed miserably in clinical trials. Ullrich and Slamon’s approach—an oncogene and an oncogene-targeted antibody—was vastly more sophisticated and specific, but Genentech was worried that pouring money into the development of another drug that failed would cripple the company’s finances. Chastened by the experience of others
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—“allergic to cancer,” as one Genentech researcher described it—Genentech pulled funding away from most of its cancer projects. The decision created a deep rift in the company. A small cadre of scientists
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ardently supported the cancer program, but Genentech’s executives wanted to focus on simpler and more profitable drugs. Her-2 was caught in the cross fire. Drained and dejected, Ullrich left
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from a human drug. Mouse antibodies, being “foreign” proteins, provoke a potent immune response in humans and make terrible human drugs. To circumvent that response, Genentech’s antibody needed to be converted into a protein that more closely resembled a human antibody. This process, evocatively called “humanizing” an antibody, is a
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delicate art, somewhat akin to translating a novel; what matters is not just the content, but the ineffable essence of the antibody—its form. Genentech’s resident “humanizer” was Paul Carter, a quiet, twenty-nine-year-old Englishman who had learned the craft at Cambridge from Cesar Milstein, the
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responses in many of the thirteen other women were more ambiguous. At the three-month midpoint of the trial, when Slamon reviewed the data with Genentech and the external trial monitors, tough decisions clearly needed to be made. Tumors had remained unchanged in size in some women—not shrunk, but
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rapidly progressive variants of the disease, and patients were willing to try any therapy that could produce a clinical benefit. Breast cancer activists pounded on Genentech’s doors to urge the release of the drug to women with Her-2 positive cancer who had failed other therapies. These patients, the
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a potentially lifesaving medicine now. “True success happens,” as one writer put it in 1995, “only when these new drugs actually enter bodies.” For Genentech, though, “true success” was defined by vastly different imperatives. Herceptin had not been approved by the FDA; it was a molecule in its infancy
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. Genentech wanted carefully executed early-phase trials—not just new drugs entering bodies, but carefully monitored drugs entering carefully monitored bodies in carefully monitored trials. For
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the next phase of Herceptin trials launched in 1993, Genentech wanted to stay small and focused. The number of women enrolled in these trials had been kept to an absolute minimum: twenty-seven patients at
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drug works or not. All you’re doing is delaying . . . being able to get it out into the public.” Outside the cloistered laboratories of Genentech, the controversy ignited a firestorm. San Francisco, of course, was no stranger to this issue of compassionate use versus focused research. In the late 1980s
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soon found herself inhabiting a Kafkaesque nightmare. Her HMO insisted that because Herceptin was in investigational trials, testing the tumor for Her-2 was useless. Genentech insisted that without Her-2 status confirmed, giving her access to Herceptin was untenable. In the summer of 1993, with Nelson’s cancer advancing daily
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Her-2 positive. She was an ideal candidate for the drug. But the news came too late. Nine days later, still awaiting Herceptin approval from Genentech, Marti Nelson drifted into a coma and died. She was forty-one years old. For BCA activists, Nelson’s death was a watershed event.
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Livid and desperate, a group of women from the BCA stormed through the Genentech campus on December 5, 1994, to hold a fifteen-car “funeral procession” for Nelson with placards showing Nelson in her chemo turban before her
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Even Curd admitted, if somewhat begrudgingly, that the BCA was “a tough group [and] their activism is not misguided.” In 1995, a small delegation of Genentech scientists and executives thus flew to Washington to meet Frances Visco, the chair of the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC), a powerful national coalition of
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Visco, a former attorney, had spent nearly a decade immersed in the turbulent politics of breast cancer. Visco had a proposal for Genentech, but her terms were inflexible: Genentech had to provide an expanded access program for Herceptin. This program would allow oncologists to treat patients outside clinical trials. In return,
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the National Breast Cancer Coalition would act as a go-between for Genentech and its embittered and alienated community of cancer patients. Visco offered to join the planning committee of the phase III trials of Herceptin, and to
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help recruit patients for the trial using the NBCC’s extensive network. For Genentech, this was a long-overdue education. Rather than running trials on breast cancer patients, the company learned to run trials with breast cancer patients
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any ethically difficult decision-making.) It was an uneasy triangle of forces—academic researchers, the pharmaceutical industry, and patient advocates—united by a deadly disease. Genentech’s next phase of trials involved large-scale, randomized studies on thousands of women with metastatic Her-2 positive cancer, comparing Herceptin treatment against placebo
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enormous Listservs. Kay Dickersin, a coalition member and an epidemiologist, joined the Data Safety and Monitoring board of the trial, underscoring the new partnership between Genentech and the NBCC, between academic medicine and activism. And an all-star team of breast oncologists was assembled to run the trial: Larry Norton from
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, Daniel Hayes from Harvard, and, of course, Slamon from UCLA. In 1995, empowered by the very forces that it had resisted for so long, Genentech launched three independent phase III trials to test Herceptin. The most pivotal of the three was a trial labeled 648, randomizing women newly diagnosed with
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versus chemotherapy with Herceptin added. Trial 648 was launched in 150 breast cancer clinics around the world. The trial would enroll 469 women and cost Genentech $15 million to run. In May 1998, eighteen thousand cancer specialists flocked to Los Angeles to attend the thirty-fourth meeting of the American Society
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of Clinical Oncology, where Genentech would unveil the data from the Herceptin trials, including trial 648. On Sunday, May 17, the third day of the meeting, an expectant audience
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scientific life on those bands. Others had joined the gamble: Ullrich, Shepard, Carter, Botstein and Levinson, Visco and the activists, pharma executives and clinicians and Genentech. The trial results to be announced that afternoon represented the result of that gamble. But Slamon wouldn’t—he couldn’t—rush to the end
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On the evening of May 17, 1998, after Slamon had announced the results of the 648 study to a stunned audience at the ASCO meeting, Genentech threw an enormous cocktail party at the Hollywood Terrace, an open-air restaurant nestled in the hills of Los Angeles. Wine flowed freely, and the
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longer reserved for clinical trials or compassionate use alone. “The company,” Robert Bazell, the journalist, wrote, “invited all the investigators, as well as most of Genentech’s Her-2 team. The activists came too: Marilyn McGregor and Bob Erwin [Marti Nelson’s husband] from San Francisco and Fran Visco from the
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of 1984: Robert Bazell, Her-2: The Making of Herceptin, a Revolutionary Treatment for Breast Cancer (New York: Random House, 1998). 414 In 1982, Genentech unveiled the first: “A New Insulin Given Approval for Use in U.S.,” New York Times, October 30, 1982. 414 in 1984, it produced a
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clotting factor: “Genentech Corporate Chronology,” http://www .gene.com/gene/about/corporate/history/timeline.html (accessed January 30, 2010). 414 in 1985, it created a recombinant version: Ibid
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stromal tumor (GIST), 467–70 Gay Men’s Health Crisis, 318 gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), see AIDS Geller, Henry, 265–66 gemcitabine (Gemzar), 154 Genentech, 413, 414–19, 423–29 Herceptin trials of, 420–22, 424, 426–29, 430 Nelson’s “funeral procession” at, 425–26 genes, genomes, 6
As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
by Matthew Cobb · 15 Nov 2022 · 772pp · 150,109 words
scientists, molecular biology’s age of innocence was coming to an end and recombinant DNA was about to shake the world. ✴ The new-born Genentech may have fixed its sights on creating insulin using recombinant DNA, but so too had several academic research groups – and they had the immense advantage
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of actually having scientists to do the work. Genentech was barely more than a rented office and some headed notepaper. The growing interest in insulin from molecular geneticists became clear at the annual Eli
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these animals grew extremely large, producing substantial quantities of mRNA. At this point strategic differences emerged between the academic groups and the more business-focused Genentech researchers that were to have major consequences. Both Harvard and the Goodman–Rutter team at UCSF were intending to extract mRNA, use reverse transcriptase to
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unease at the supposed dangers of recombinant DNA, it was a canny move for private companies to voluntarily follow the NIH regulations. Much more significantly, Genentech decided not to use cDNA at all. Rather than wading through piles of rat corpses, it took a much more direct route: it would
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team over nine years to complete; it was eventually published in twelve back-to-back papers.21 This was the kind of feat that the Genentech team was intending to emulate but under immense pressure to produce rapid results – a situation nothing like that normally experienced by academics. The insulin
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gene would be slightly smaller than Khorana’s tRNA (153 base pairs), but this was still an immense challenge. The Genentech gamble was not completely bonkers. Boyer was already working with Arthur Riggs and Keiichi Itakura at City of Hope National Medical Center, near Los Angeles
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at the end of 1977 and was announced a few days before publication at a press conference in a Los Angeles hotel; the role of Genentech was barely mentioned.25 This was the decisive scientific and technical breakthrough that made possible today’s global biotech industry. The researchers recognised the
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their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain’. Then, at the November 1977 Senate hearings into recombinant DNA, Berg highlighted the still-unpublished Genentech research on somatostatin in his evidence, generously describing it as ‘extraordinary… astonishing… ingenious… elegant’.28 Berg also used the somatostatin work to emphasise to
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the Senate subcommittee the growing commercial potential of genetic engineering, although oddly he did not mention the involvement of Genentech: The ability to isolate pure genes puts us at the threshold of new forms of medicine, industry, and agriculture. Tailor-made organisms produced by
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the human insulin gene into bacteria. This competition pitted the cDNA groups, mainly those at Harvard and at UCSF, against each other and against the Genentech-funded scientists using the synthetic approach. The term race is not a retrospective interpretation – the members of the three principal groups were intensely aware of
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for Swanson on an industrial estate near San Francisco airport which eventually expanded into an adjoining warehouse.ii Nevertheless, by the beginning of 1978, when Genentech was focusing on insulin, it still had ‘no products, no salesmen, no full-time scientists, not even its own lab’ as an early account
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24/7 demands of a US academic research team engaged in a scientific race, pressured by the potential of immense financial rewards. Meanwhile, the Genentech approach of simply synthesising a gene that would directly produce the insulin molecule itself was steaming ahead. Mature insulin is composed of a total of
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1979, signed by researchers from Riggs and Itakura’s group at City of Hope and by scientists from the grandiosely titled Division of Molecular Biology, Genentech, Inc.41 (Boyer, who had not directly contributed to the research, did not sign the article, perhaps also to placate those at UCSF who
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airlock, dipping his shoes in formaldehyde on his way into the chamber in which he was obliged to conduct his experiments. While out at Genentech we were simply synthesising DNA and throwing it into bacteria, none of which even required compliance with the NIH guidelines.42 Things were even worse
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for Gilbert than the Genentech crew realised. Following weeks of work in the most trying conditions, after crossing thousands of miles of ocean and spending tens of thousands of
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human proinsulin cDNA clones had been lost in an incubator accident. Gilbert later described the trip as a total disaster.43 ✴ The insulin achievement propelled Genentech into a completely different world. Days after the result became known, Lilly paid the start-up a total of $500,000 to commercialise the
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synthetic gene approach to insulin production (Genentech would get 6 per cent royalties on all sales). There was a catch, of course – Lilly needed the scientific breakthrough to be turned into an
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criteria and very tight deadlines to scale up the method. These were met, and within two years of using a synthetic gene to produce insulin, Genentech had enough for a clinical trial. The results appeared in the Lancet in August 1980 and showed that, in healthy men, genetically synthesised human
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this, and the forbidden plasmid was finally certified in July 1977 (it is still used by researchers). In spiky exchanges about the role of Genentech (which had nothing to do with the affair), the senators grilled Rutter and Boyer over whether competition and the profit motive were behind the breach
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a cDNA sequence of rat growth hormone.53 Work was progressing on extracting mRNA from human pituitary tumours when the row over the patent broke. Genentech, well aware of the tensions in the department, invited Seeburg and Ullrich to come and work for them. The start-up had recently signed
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publish in scientific journals, making money was, after all, its raison d’être. However, there was to be no immediate US approval for the Genentech recombinant human growth hormone. It showed no benefits over the natural product, which was derived from the pituitary gland at the base of the brain
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who had received human growth hormone injections as children had tragically died of CJD, presumably transmitted with their treatment. Under massive pressure, regulators rapidly allowed Genentech’s recombinant growth hormone to be prescribed. Within two decades sales of the drug had passed $2 billion.57 Nevertheless, there was a shadow hanging
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over Genentech’s success – the origin of the cDNA they used to clone the growth hormone gene remained murky. At the time, they claimed they recreated
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had not used the samples that Seeburg snatched on New Year’s Eve. Not everyone believed this story. In 1990, the University of California sued Genentech, alleging theft of their cDNA samples, thus beginning another long court case that finally ended in 1999. During his evidence, Seeburg sensationally claimed that
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deal – included $50 million to be paid to UCSF towards the construction of a flagship research building on their new campus (the building is called Genentech Hall), $65 million to the university, and an astonishing $85 million to be split equally between the five people at UCSF who were working
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with ‘Voodoo Child’.60 ✴ The influx of massive sums of money into genetic engineering changed many things, not least the lives of the people involved. Genentech was the first and most successful of the genetic engineering start-ups – by the beginning of 1980 it had agreements with three major pharmaceutical companies
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yourself the other side of a burst bubble and miss out. Plus, getting into bed with a big company would guarantee an investment stream. But Genentech’s products were too odd, and its recombinant DNA business plan too uncertain, to interest either of the two major companies they approached – US
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of $80 million. With public and institutional fears about recombinant DNA evaporating and an increasing appetite for speculation as the US stock market rose, the Genentech founders abandoned the idea of selling to the highest bidder and instead made plans to go public. But there was a problem – although the
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a car. ‘At some point, those eight hundred shares were worth more than a million dollars’, he recalled, exaggerating slightly, ‘… Oh god!’64 The Genentech sale, which occurred as the US economy was again mired in recession, heralded a new period on the US stock market. Investors and speculators flocked
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president of the New York Stock Exchange, 1980 was ‘probably the most profitable year in the history of Wall Street’.65 Two months after the Genentech IPO, the far more reliable prospect of the Apple Computing Company – already turning a tidy profit – followed suit. It was the most heavily oversubscribed
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of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA’. The San Francisco Examiner ran the story on its front page, but the main headline was ‘Genentech jolts Wall Street’. The two strands of glory emerging from recombinant DNA, one academic, the other financial, sat together in the space of a
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looks like now. – SEVEN – BIO-RICHES 1980 was a pivotal year for genetic engineering. Not only did Paul Berg win the Nobel Prize and Genentech launch on the stock market, but that year was also marked by two decisive legal changes in the United States which shaped how science was
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. The focus of both changes was the right to own and exploit discoveries through patents, including on forms of life. Part of what made Genentech and other companies so attractive to investors was the prospect of their patent portfolios being lucratively licensed to other companies. But before that could happen
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between two institutions’.21 For many scientists, such organisational arrangements were less exciting than the prospect of making an individual discovery and an individual fortune. Genentech became the exemplar of the genetic engineering gold rush as scores of new start-ups were created, none of which had either the scientific or
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point, $10 billion had been invested in the field and 150 companies had gone public, but although they raised an additional $4 billion, only Genentech was making a sustained profit and that was ‘disappointingly small’, sniffled the bosses’ magazine.38 The financial excitement in the United States was above all
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began to cause ripples in academic life, with many researchers noting the corrosive effects of the new situation. In 1977, at the very beginning of Genentech’s involvement with UCSF, microbiologist David Martin told Science: ‘Capitalism sticking its nose into the lab has tainted interpersonal relations – there are a number
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no commercialisation of human insulin.’46 A postdoctoral researcher in Boyer’s laboratory described how business changed the relationships between those who were working on Genentech projects and the rest of the researchers: ‘You knew they weren’t free to talk about their work. They were your friends, so you
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soon encountered problems with public acceptance. The company used recombinant bacteria to produce bovine growth hormone (BGH) – related to the human somatostatin that had been Genentech’s first success in 1977. This hormone was purified and injected into cows, leading to increased milk production. There was substantial opposition from dairy producers
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Maxine Singer is on the panel, second from the left; NIH Director Donald Fredrickson is on the far right. 6. City of Hope Hospital and Genentech researchers who produced insulin in a bacterium using recombinant DNA. Left to right: Keiichi Itakura, Arthur Riggs, David Goeddel and Roberto Crea. Dig Riggs’
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p. 567. 44 Morrow, J., et al. (1974), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 71:1743–7, p. 1747. 45 Hughes, S. (2011), Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago, Chicago University Press), p. 20. 46 Berg, A Stanford Professor’s Career, p. 115. 47 Brenner, S. (1974), Nature 248
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Business 1 I have particularly relied upon Hall, S. (1988), Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesise a Human Gene (London, Sidgwick & Jackson); Hughes, S. (2011), Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago, Chicago University Press); Rasmussen, N. (2016), Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University
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. Had he kept with his initial decision he would eventually have been a billionaire. 11 Robertson, M. (1974), Nature 251:564–5. 12 Hughes, Genentech, p. 41. With his ungainly suggestion, Swanson may have been trying to riff on the name of a famous Washington Post cartoonist, Herb Block, who
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synthesise human insulin, see Riggs, A. (2021), Endocrine Reviews 42:374–80. 25 Itakura, K., et al. (1977), Science 198:1056–63. 26 Hughes, Genentech, p. 63. 27 Hall, Invisible Frontiers, p. 176. 28 Quotes in this and subsequent two paragraphs from US Senate, Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
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Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space (1978), pp. 176–243. 48 Wade, N. (1977), Science 197:1342–5. 49 Ullrich et al. (1977). 50 Hughes, Genentech, p. 127. 51 Marshall, E. (1997), Science 277:1028–30; Cook-Deegan, R. (1997), Science 278:557–61. 52 New York Times Magazine, 17 February
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Basel, Editiones Roche). 62 Teitelman, R. (1989), Gene Dreams: Wall Street, Academia, and the Rise of Biotechnology (New York, Basic), pp. 25–6. 63 Hughes, Genentech, p. 158. 64 Ibid., p. 159. 65 New York Times, 1 January 1981. 66 Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 23. 67 Cohen, Science, Biotechnology, and Recombinant
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., p. 118. 6 Krimsky, S. (1999), Chicago-Kent Law Review 75:15–39. 7 Lyon & Lyon, Thomas D. Kiley (1980), Brief on Behalf of Genentech, Inc., Amicus Curiae. 8 https://ipmall.info/content/diamond-v-chakrabarty-peoples-business-commission 9 Krimsky (1999). 10 US Supreme Court, Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980
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(London, University of Chicago Press). 20 Culliton, B. (1982a), Science 216:960–2. 21 Culliton, B. (1982b), Science 216:1295–6. 22 Hughes, S. (2011), Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago, Chicago University Press); Kornberg, A. (1995), The Golden Helix: Inside Biotech Ventures (Sausalito: Science Books). 23 Culliton (1982a), p. 961
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the Advancement of Science forum on recombinant DNA, March 1977. Photo: Courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences (US) 6. City of Hope Hospital and Genentech researchers. Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images 7. Ananda Chakrabarty in front of the Supreme Court in 1980. Photo: Ted Spiegel–Corbis/Getty Images 8. Label
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words
On April 1, 1976, Swanson appeared with Boyer in the Kleiner Perkins conference room.[83] Swanson sketched out the business plan. Their company, now named Genentech, needed six months to negotiate licenses governing the gene-splicing techniques, which were held by the University of California and Stanford. Then it would recruit
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-and-mustache guy knew how to conduct them.[85] And if the experiments did work, the sky was the limit. The first product that Genentech proposed to manufacture was insulin, for which there was a huge and growing market. The existing way of harvesting insulin conjured up images of medieval
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witchcraft: every drop of the hormone had to be pressed from the pancreas glands of pigs and cows. Perkins figured to himself that Genentech would have a bit less than a fifty-fifty shot at creating a viable product.[86] But precisely because the technical challenges were so formidable
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, the barriers to entry in this business would be high, and Genentech would be able to extract fat margins if it succeeded. It was another illustration of Perkins’s law. The next day Perkins met Swanson again
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existing laboratories. Perkins was suggesting what amounted to a virtual company. America’s postwar economy had been dominated by big corporations and big labor unions; Genentech would mark the arrival of a new industrial form, more networked and more nimble.[88] In future, the central research departments at industrial behemoths would
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in knowledge as they needed it. Already, Perkins had launched Tandem by recruiting short-term consultants from Hewlett-Packard. Now he was urging that Genentech do the same in the more complex field of biotechnology. Swanson and Boyer accepted the proposal. They would use their initial budget to contract with
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exceptional testing facility. In this way, they would have the benefit of the best teams in the field, and they would also slash their costs. Genentech still might fail, but it would do so cheaply. Perkins agreed to invest the new sum that Swanson needed: a mere $100,000. It
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early Tandem consultants. In exchange for this modest commitment, representing just over 1 percent of the Kleiner Perkins fund, he acquired fully one-quarter of Genentech’s stock. There was nothing unfair about this: Swanson had tried to shop the deal elsewhere and had found no takers.[89] But by
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buying a quarter of Genentech so cheaply, the venture capitalist had taken a position that could pay off at an extraordinarily high rate. If Perkins might have hoped for,
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an irresistible one. In May 1976, a California securities regulator wrote to Kleiner Perkins, expressing concern about the riskiness of the Genentech investment. “Kleiner & Perkins realizes that an investment in Genentech is highly speculative, but we are in the business of making highly speculative investments,” Kleiner wrote back calmly.[90] As
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it turned out, creating a first product cost Genentech more time and capital than Swanson had predicted. To keep the company going, Perkins put together a new financing round in February 1977 and then
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the next research milestone. But the virtue of stage-by-stage financing became increasingly obvious. As successive risks were eliminated, each financing round valued Genentech higher than the previous one, so the founders could raise larger sums while giving away less equity. Having parted with a quarter of their company
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who set to work on the DNA technology. The scientists knew that they could continue their experiments only if they hit the promised milestones before Genentech’s money ran out.[92] At the same time, when they did reach their targets, they had a personal stake in the higher company
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valuation that resulted. Just as Arthur Rock had done at Intel, Perkins had insisted that Genentech employees, including the key contractors, get stock options.[93] At first, not all the scientists cared about the options or understood what they meant.
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down my back. I smoked marijuana every day,” said one. “I didn’t give a damn about money or stock or anything.” But as Genentech’s valuation multiplied twenty-six-fold during its first two years, the equity culture took hold.[94] Everyone from the janitor up was rooting for
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. Even that ponytailed scientist changed his tune when his stock proved to be worth more than $1 million.[95] Perkins also contributed intangibly to Genentech’s culture. He was the first venture capitalist to revel unashamedly in the role of promoter and front man, signaling to the scientists that they
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, under the glare of television lights, a press conference announced the production of artificial insulin to an astonished nation. Two years later, in 1980, Genentech staged a stock market debut that anticipated the 1990s. By conventional standards, the company was completely unready for a flotation: it spent so much on
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brightly colored beads, the professor explained how DNA from one organism could be inserted into another, and his financial audiences gaped in admiration. To underwrite Genentech’s share offering, Kleiner Perkins hired Bud Coyle, Arthur Rock’s old boss at Hayden, Stone, luring him out of retirement. Coyle was celebrated
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on Wall Street for his part in discovering the semiconductor business. Every investor remembered how profitable that had been. Genentech went public on the Nasdaq exchange on October 14, 1980. Within a minute of the bell’s ringing, its stock had jumped from the
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.[100] As the stock continued to soar, the partnership found itself sitting on a multiple of more than 200x.[101] Together with Tandem, the Genentech bonanza turned the first Kleiner Perkins fund into a legend, and a dramatic illustration of the power law. As of 1984, the fourteen investments in
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the first fund showed a combined profit of $208 million; of that, fully 95 percent came from Tandem and Genentech. Without those two home-run investments, the first fund would have generated a multiple of 4.5x, still comfortably outperforming the return on the S
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hedge fund hires astrophysicists to look for patterns in markets, it may discover statistical signals that are reliably profitable. But when Perkins backed Tandem and Genentech, or when Valentine backed Atari, they could not muster the same certainty. They were investing in human founders with human combinations of brilliance and weakness
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obvious. It was Perkins who brought in the early consultants to eliminate the white-hot risks at Tandem, and Perkins who pressed Swanson to contract Genentech’s research out to existing laboratories. Similarly, it was Valentine who drove Atari to focus on Home Pong and to ally itself with Sears,
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character and intellect, they stamped their will on their portfolio companies. Chapter Four The Whispering of Apple By the late 1970s, when Kleiner Perkins backed Genentech, the West Coast venture-capital industry had developed much of its modern tool kit. The equity-only, time-limited fund had displaced the leveraged Small
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The train was leaving. The image of the moving train represented a new gloss on stage-by-stage investing. In the case of Atari or Genentech, follow-on venture capitalists wrote checks once the white-hot risks had been neutralized. In the case of Apple, VCs were being told that they
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. “The people running this company . . . are very bright, very creative and very driven,” Rock had assured them.[39] In December 1980, two months after Genentech’s IPO, Morgan Stanley helped Apple to go public. Of the 237 initial public offerings that year, Apple’s was easily the largest, raising more
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protected investing partners from lawsuits. No other country was so friendly to the venture industry. Powered by the mouthwatering profits generated by exits such as Genentech and Apple, capital flooded into venture funds from the late 1970s. In the five years from 1973 to 1977, the venture industry had raised
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Coast rivals. There was no tradition of VCs rolling up their sleeves and helping to design startups, as Tom Perkins had done with Tandem and Genentech. There was not even the habit of backing a promising technologist and then finding him a CEO, as Sutter Hill had done in its
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Rock-style liberation. But there was a limit to the new ideas. Peter Thiel’s power-law-driven theories could be pushed too far. From Genentech to Cisco and onward, there had been plenty of cases in which hands-on venture capital had fueled the success of portfolio companies. Likewise,
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years of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the partnership had appeared lopsided. Tom Perkins was the flamboyant and domineering rainmaker, the creative genius behind Tandem and Genentech, and he overshadowed the other three named partners. But if you looked under the hood, the other partners did matter—not necessarily because of their
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into the venture elite in such a way that skill obviously does matter. Kleiner Perkins became a leader in the business because of Tandem and Genentech. Both companies were hatched from within the KP office and actively shaped by Tom Perkins; there was nothing lucky about this. Tiger Global and
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point that high-risk, high-cost moon shots can pay off if the VC owns enough of the upside. Echoing what Kleiner Perkins did with Genentech, Flagship incubated startups internally and eliminated the white-hot risks before seeking capital from other firms. As a result, Flagship usually retained around half
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of $50,000. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66 Although Tandem was not the only home run in the first Kleiner Perkins fund, the other one, Genentech, had not yet come good when KP raised its second fund in 1977. The Perkins confession is taken from Clemson, Tandem Computers Unplugged, 13.
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.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt9c6006s1&&doc.view=entire_text. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71 Berlin, Troublemakers, 193. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72 Sally Smith Hughes, Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 33–34. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73 Perkins, Valley Boy, 119. BACK TO NOTE
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REFERENCE 74 Hughes, Genentech, 32. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75 Hughes, Genentech, 34. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76 Berlin, Troublemakers, 194–95. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77 Berlin, Troublemakers, 195. BACK TO NOTE
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REFERENCE 78 A bronze statue, depicting the first meeting between Swanson and Boyer in a San Francisco tavern, now sits outside a research building on Genentech’s campus. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79 Swanson, interview by Hughes. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80 Perkins, “Tom Perkins: Early Bay Area Venture Capitalists,”
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46. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81 Hughes, Genentech, 37. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82 Unbeknownst to anybody in the room, this was the same day that Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple. BACK TO
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: $300 in Stock Turns Buyer into Millionaire,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 16, 1980. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95 Fred Middleton, Genentech’s finance director, says of Swanson, “Bob and I both had a tremendous amount of respect for Tom Perkins as a highly visible promoter, marketer
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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46 Wilson, New Venturers, 60. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47 Thomas K. Perkins, “Kleiner Perkins, Venture Capital, and the Chairmanship of Genentech, 1976–1995,” interview by Glenn E. Bugos, 2001, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2002. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48 In
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a chaotic company into a winner. 1974 Kleiner Perkins “incubates” Tandem Computers in-house before spinning it out as a startup. 1976 Kleiner Perkins backs Genentech, building it into a success through the device of stage-by-stage financing. 1977 After multiple rejections, Apple secures financing, proving that a network
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of VCs is superior to a few individuals. 1977 Dick Kramlich and two East Coast partners establish New Enterprise Associates. 1980 Apple and Genentech stage dramatically successful IPOs, anticipating later tech euphoria. 1981 Bob Metcalfe strives to raise venture finance on the East Coast but ends up with
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Apple and Markkula, 85 Chinese law and, 231, 232, 233, 240 eBay, 170 Facebook and Milner, 275–77 Fairchild Semiconductor, 36–37, 45, 46, 54 Genentech, 77 Intel and Rock, 56–57, 84, 424n JD.com, 237 tax policy and, 92, 398 Emtage, Alan, 20 endowments. See university endowments Engelbart,
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Gandhi, Sameer, 313, 441n Gates, Bill, 154, 184 GE Information Services, 138, 139–40, 142–43, 379 gender diversity, 14, 267–72, 384–85, 412 Genentech, 72–78, 264, 383, 427n General Atlantic, 180, 243 General Catalyst, 455n General Electric (GE), 28, 138–43 General Motors Institute, 163 General Transistor, 32
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107, 109 decline of, 261–72, 377, 449n Facebook, 376–77 Forbes Midas List, 263, 304, 449n founding of, 67–69 gender issues, 267–72 Genentech, 72–78, 264 GO Corp., 122–28 Golden State Warriors, 301–2 Google, 179–88, 190, 263, 328, 382 Khosla at, 5–6, 9–11
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Perella, Joseph, 178 Perelman, Ronald, 287 Perkins, Tom, 60, 67–72, 74–80, 264, 378 Apple investment, 82, 83 founding of Kleiner Perkins, 67–70 Genentech investment, 74–79, 80 GO Corp. investment, 122–23 investing strategy of, 60, 69–70, 72, 75, 128, 266 Silicon Compilers and Ungermann-Bass, 108
The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee · 16 May 2016 · 824pp · 218,333 words
II Swanson was bitterly opposed to the whole plan. Somatostatin, he feared, would turn into a distraction; he wanted Boyer to move to insulin directly. Genentech was living in borrowed space on borrowed money. Scratched even a millimeter below its surface, the “pharma company” was, in truth, a rented cubicle in
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—a pharmaceutical Ponzi scheme. Still, Boyer convinced Swanson to give somatostatin a chance. They hired an attorney, Tom Kiley, to negotiate the agreements among UCSF, Genentech, and the City of Hope. Kiley had never heard the term molecular biology, but felt confident because of his track record of representing unusual cases
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; before Genentech, his most famous former client had been Miss Nude America. Time too felt borrowed at Genentech. Boyer and Swanson knew that two reigning wizards of genetics had also entered the race to make insulin
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look at the printout of the radioimmunoassay, and the printout show[s] clearly that the gene is expressed.” He turned to Swanson. “Somatostatin is there.” Genentech’s scientists could barely stop to celebrate the success of the somatostatin experiment. One evening, one new human protein; by the next morning, the scientists
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nucleotide from scratch. A synthetic gene—DNA created as a naked chemical—fell into the gray zone of Asilomar’s language and was relatively exempt. Genentech, as a privately funded company, was also relatively exempt from the federal guidelines.III The combination of factors proved to be a crucial advantage for
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through an airlock, dipping his shoes in formaldehyde on his way into the chamber in which he was obliged to conduct his experiments. Out at Genentech, we were simply synthesizing DNA and throwing it into bacteria, none of which even required compliance with the NIH guidelines.” In the world of post
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-Asilomar genetics, “being natural” had turned out to be a liability. Genentech’s “office”—the glorified booth in San Francisco—was no longer adequate. Swanson began scouring the city for lab space for his nascent company. In
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flank of hillside a few miles south of San Francisco, the place was called Industrial City, although it was hardly industrial and barely a city. Genentech’s lab was ten thousand square feet of a raw warehouse on 460 Point San Bruno Boulevard, set amid storage silos, dump sites, and airport
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freight hangars. The back half of the warehouse housed a storage facility for a distributor of porn videos. “You’d go through the back of Genentech’s door and there would be all these movies on shelves,” one early recruit wrote. Boyer hired a few additional scientists—some barely out of
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contaminate another in a biochemical reaction. In the narrow cleft of time between Gilbert’s move to England and the mistaken cloning of rat insulin, Genentech forged ahead. It was an inverted fable: an academic Goliath versus a pharmaceutical David, one lumbering, powerful, handicapped by size, the other nimble, quick, adept
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at dancing around rules. By May 1978, the Genentech team had synthesized the two chains of insulin in bacteria. By July, the scientists had purified the proteins out of the bacteria debris. In early
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a test tube to create the first molecules of recombinant insulin. In September 1978, two weeks after Goeddel had created insulin in a test tube, Genentech applied for a patent for insulin. Right at the onset, the company faced a series of unprecedented legal challenges. Since 1952, the United States Patent
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categories. But how could insulin be pigeonholed into that list? It was a “manufactured material,” but virtually every human body could evidently manufacture it without Genentech’s ministrations. It was a “composition of matter,” but also, indisputably, a natural product. Why was patenting insulin, the protein or its gene, different from
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patenting any other part of the human body—say, the nose or cholesterol? Genentech’s approach to this problem was both ingenious and counterintuitive. Rather than patenting insulin as “matter” or “manufacture,” it concentrated its efforts, boldly, on a
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a cell for medicinal use—that the audacity paid off. On October 26, 1982, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a patent to Genentech to use recombinant DNA to produce a protein such as insulin or somatostatin in a microbial organism. As one observer wrote: “effectively, the patent claimed
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, as an invention, [all] genetically modified microorganisms.” The Genentech patent would soon become one of the most lucrative, and most hotly disputed, patents in the history of technology. Insulin was a major milestone for
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the biotechnology industry, and a blockbuster drug for Genentech. But it was not, notably, the medicine that would catapult gene-cloning technology to the forefront of public imagination. In April 1982, a ballet dancer
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virus. The syndrome was renamed acquired immunodeficiency syndrome—AIDS. In the spring of 1983, against the backdrop of the early AIDS cases, Dave Goeddel at Genentech began to focus on cloning the factor VIII gene. As with insulin, the logic behind the cloning effort was immediately evident: rather than purifying the
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and so forth. But the factor VIII gene was far too large to be created using DNA chemistry. To isolate the factor VIII gene, both Genentech and GI would need to pull the native gene out of human cells, spooling it out as if extracting a worm from the soil. But
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VIII began to appear in the tissue-culture fluid. In April, exactly two years after the first AIDS clusters had been reported in America, both Genentech and GI announced that they had purified recombinant factor VIII in test tubes—a blood-clotting factor untainted by human blood. In March 1987, Gilbert
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thus marked a transition not just between one gene and one medicine, but between genes and a novel universe of drugs. On October 14, 1980, Genentech sold 1 million of its shares to the public, provocatively listing itself at the stock exchange under the trading symbol GENE. This initial sale would
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for helping to clone the somatostatin gene over the summer of 1977 woke up one morning and found himself a newly minted multimillionaire. In 1982, Genentech began to produce human growth hormone—HGH—used to treat certain variants of dwarfism. In 1986, biologists at the company cloned alpha interferon, a potent
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immunological protein used to treat blood cancers. In 1987, Genentech made recombinant TPA, a blood thinner to dissolve the clots that occur during a stroke or a heart attack. In 1990, it launched efforts to
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create vaccines out of recombinant genes, beginning with a vaccine against hepatitis B. In December 1990, Roche Pharmaceuticals acquired a majority stake in Genentech for $2.1 billion. Swanson stepped down as the chief executive; Boyer left his position as vice president in 1991. In the summer of 2001
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, Genentech launched its physical expansion into the largest biotech research complex in the world—a multiacre stretch of glass-wrapped buildings, rolling greens, and Frisbee-playing
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fifty-two, he was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a brain tumor. He died on December 6, 1999, at home in Hillsborough, a few miles from Genentech’s campus. * * * I. Minkowski does not recollect this, but others present in the lab have written about the urine-as-treacle experiment. II. They
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, from Caltech. Boyer put two researchers, Herbert Heyneker and Francisco Bolivar, on the project. The City of Hope added another DNA chemist, Roberto Crea. III. Genentech’s strategy for the synthesis of insulin was also critical to its relative exemption from Asilomar’s protocols. In the human pancreas, insulin is normally
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synthesized as a single contiguous protein and then cut into two pieces, leaving just a narrow cross-linkage. Genentech, in contrast, had chosen to synthesize the two chains of insulin, A and B, as separate, individual proteins and link them together afterward. Since
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the two separate chains used by Genentech were not “natural” genes, the synthesis did not fall under the federal moratorium that restricted the creation of recombinant DNA with “natural” genes. PART FOUR
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“active” fragments of genes—be patented? At Stanford, Boyer and Cohen, recall, had patented a method to “recombine” pieces of DNA to create genetic chimeras. Genentech had patented a process to express proteins such as insulin in bacteria. In 1984, Amgen had filed a patent for the isolation of the blood
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be definitively ascribed to a single gene. It was also one of the first genetic diseases for which an artificially engineered protein was created, by Genentech in 1984. The idea of using gene therapy for hemophilia had first been broached in the mid-1980s. Since hemophilia is caused by the lack
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of eugenics would be used to create a “perfect race.” The link to Nazi eugenics was not forgotten. Herb Boyer (left) and Robert Swanson founded Genentech in 1976 to produce medicines out of genes. The drawing on the blackboard shows the scheme to produce insulin using recombinant DNA technology. The first
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the organizers and participants”: Ibid. “Clone or Die” If you know the question: Herbert W. Boyer, “Recombinant DNA research at UCSF and commercial application at Genentech: Oral history transcript, 2001,” Online Archive of California, 124, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/search?style=oac4;titlesAZ=r;idT=UCb11453293x. Any sufficiently advanced technology
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technology,” Genetics 184, no. 1 (2010): 9–17, doi:10.1534/genetics.109.112144. Swanson came to see Boyer in January 1976: Sally Smith Hughes, Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), “Prologue.” Boyer rejected Swanson’s suggestion of HerBob: Felda Hardymon and Tom Nicholas, “Kleiner-Perkins
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and Genentech: When venture capital met science,” Harvard Business School Case 813-102, October 2012, http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=43569. In 1869
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chain of insulin. 1. The identification of lower peptides from partial hydrolysates,” Biochemical Journal 53, no. 3 (1953): 353. To synthesize the somatostatin gene: Hughes, Genentech, 59–65. “I thought about it all the time”: “Fierce Competition to Synthesize Insulin, David Goeddel,” DNA Learning Center, https://www.dnalc.org/view/15085
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David-Goeddel.html. “Gilbert was, as he had for many days past”: Hughes, Genentech, 93. 460 Point San Bruno Boulevard: Ibid., 78. “You’d go through the back of Genentech’s door”: “Introductory materials,” First Chief Financial Officer at Genentech, 1978–1984, http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt8k40159r&brand=calisphere&doc.view
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=entire_text. Gilbert recalled. The UCSF team: Hughes, Genentech, 93. In the summer of 1978, Boyer learned: Payne Templeton
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, “Harvard group produces insulin from bacteria,” Harvard Crimson, July 18, 1978. August 21, 1978, Goeddel joined: Hughes, Genentech, 91. On October 26, 1982, the US Patent: “A history of
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firsts,” Genentech: Chronology, http://www.gene.com/media/company-information/chronology. “effectively, the patent claimed”: Luigi Palombi, Gene Cartels: Biotech Patents
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://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v5/n12/fig_tab/nrd2199_T1.html. On October 14, 1980, Genentech sold: “Genentech: Historical stock info,” Gene.com, http://www.gene.com/about-us/investors. In the summer of 2001, Genentech launched: Harold Evans, Gail Buckland, and David Lefer, They Made America: From the Steam Engine
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. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1966. Hodge, Russ. The Future of Genetics: Beyond the Human Genome Project. New York: Facts on File, 2010. Hughes, Sally Smith. Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Judson, Horace Freeland. The
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, 243 background and training of, 211 bacterial gene transfer and, 228–29, 237, 242 factor VIII cloning and, 247 gene cloning and, 215, 227, 237 Genentech and, 239, 244, 251 genetic hybrid experiments of, 211–14, 215, 222, 227 insulin synthesis and, 239, 240–42, 244, 251 recombinant DNA and,
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early research on linked genes and, 97 of factor VIII gene, 247–48, 249 finding disease-linked genes using, 276–77 gene libraries for, 224 Genentech’s use of, in medicine, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244, 251 of hemochromatosis gene, 279 Human Genome Project’s use of clone-by-clone
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–88 in schizophrenia, 445–46 search for sex-determining gene on the Y chromosome using, 361 as transformative moment in human genetics, 288, 291–92 Genentech biotech research by, 251–52, 466 factor VIII gene cloning by, 247–48 federal guidelines and, 243 founding of, 239, 241 insulin synthesis by,
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with recombinant DNA and, 206–08 challenges to implementing, 467 as conceptual shift, 294 concerns about safety of, 226 cystic fibrosis gene research using, 290n Genentech formed to explore, 239 hemophilia treatment using, 466–67 interest in future applications of, 222, 291, 417 steps in achieving, in humans, 475 genetic links
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(US), 245 patent and patent applications, 14n for Amgen’s isolation of erythropoietin, 308 for BRCA1 gene sequence, 439 for gene-fragment technology, 309 for Genentech’s insulin created in a test tube, 245 for genes, 308–09, 312 for recombinant DNA techniques, 237, 245, 308 Patrinos, Ari, 317–18
Immortality, Inc.
by Chip Walter · 7 Jan 2020 · 232pp · 72,483 words
they tripped over him, but he was a force in Silicon Valley. He was the chairman of Apple, and just a year earlier had chaired Genentech, two of Silicon Valley’s most storied early start-ups. When news of Calico hit the wires, the media snapped to. “Google vs. Death”—that
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, and new drugs joined with increasingly ingenious treatments and early cancer detection to reduce the disease 21 percent over the previous 13 years.4 At Genentech, in the 1980s and ’90s, Herb Boyer, Art Levinson, and the rest of their teams were snipping DNA with recombinant technology to create pharmaceuticals that
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attacked diabetes, heart failure, and colon, ovarian, and rectal cancers at the virological/molecular level. Under Levinson’s leadership, Genentech developed some of the first monoclonal drugs, like trastuzumab (trade name Herceptin), which could seek out and destroy specific cancer cells—in this case, an
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, Maris hadn’t thought he had a chance in hell of getting to Arthur D. Levinson, chair of Apple Inc., and CEO and chair of Genentech, the world’s first biotechnology company. Blake Byers, a Google Ventures colleague and biomedical engineer, had told Maris that if anyone could build a company
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, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (KPCB), arguably Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firm. KPCB had been an early investor in Apple, Google, Amazon, and Genentech. Genentech not only went on to revolutionize medicine and the pharmaceutical industry; it also became one of the inspirations for Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel
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Jurassic Park. Everyone in Silicon Valley knew what a force Genentech had become in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and that made Levinson a particularly appealing candidate. Nevertheless, Byers was also pretty sure Levinson would never
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be interested in getting involved in Maris’s idea. At age 62, Levinson was winding down from Genentech—and except for Apple, was downsizing from other boards and various corporate undertakings. “You’ll never get him,” Byers told Maris. “Let’s go over
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low-key. But inside the fabled worlds of Silicon Valley and the pharmaceutical industry, otherwise known as Big Pharma, everyone knew precisely who he was. Genentech was up there in the pantheon of Silicon Valley companies with Hewlett-Packard and Intel. It was founded after Herb Boyer, Stanley Cohen, and Paul
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Beaver. But it wasn’t that simple. This was a man who had once simultaneously sat on the boards of Genentech, Apple, and Google. Bob Cohen, who worked with Levinson at Genentech, said he never feared Levinson entering a meeting with another CEO because everyone knew Levinson was the smartest man in
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knowledge, and knowledge alone. Boyer, in particular, had nearly been skinned alive for his incursions into the world of business when he and Swanson created Genentech. Despite Boyer’s reputation for groundbreaking research (or maybe because of it), some of his academic colleagues considered him a traitor of the most perfidious
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it bothered him mightily. But what really got under Levinson’s skin was when they went after him. Once he had decided to take the Genentech job, one of Levinson’s professors looked him right in the face and said, “I think it’s disgusting what you’re doing, and as
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out of hand. What could he say? He liked going against the grain. It must have been in his DNA. Thus when it came to Genentech, what did Levinson care if investors or a government or foundations funded it? Let the scientists and researchers sneer and roll their eyes and tsk
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not until you had gone back to first principles and thought the thing through. Much later, when he was moving up the corporate ladder at Genentech, Levinson met Steve Jobs and eventually joined the Apple board. Then, in 2004, he was asked to join Google’s board, where he remained for
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would come. He asked Kurzweil to join him. Larry Page embraced the idea, and Google became one of Singularity University’s biggest supporters. So did Genentech. Kurzweil believed that the same artificial intelligence that would lead to the Singularity could also cure death. That thinking had spurred Maris’s belief that
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was important. And he knew Levinson was a grand master of the pharmaceutical arts. He understood molecular biology at a granular level, and had helped Genentech through some of its toughest times when he took over as CEO in 1995. And like Page, he was unusually focused and didn’t care
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complete her last year in computer science at Berkeley. That was when he ran into Herb Boyer and landed the job at Genentech. The big breakthrough that led to Genentech had come in 1972, at a meeting in Hawaii over sandwiches, when Boyer (who was then working at UCSF) and Stanford geneticist
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, cancer, Parkinson’s, or arthritis would be nothing more than a wispy dream. When Boyer hired Levinson to join the small but growing ranks of Genentech’s other bench scientists, his job was to see what secrets he could pry out of life’s genetic riddles. In particular Boyer suggested Levinson
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problem. “And what about the other half?” “Just make yourself useful,” Boyer said. The gene incompatibility expression problem was indeed thorny, and had been frustrating Genentech researchers for some time. It was related to hepatitis B, a disease that afflicted billions of people. Over time it destroyed their livers, and eventually
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, the rest of their bodies. An effective vaccine, if it could be created, would save millions of lives. Genentech was struggling to use recombinant DNA to create large batches of hep B vaccine, something that would deliver a major breakthrough in the treatment. The
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percent. But this vaccine was at least 95 percent effective. It stopped the disease in its biological tracks! Not only that, the new method improved Genentech’s yield tenfold and cut costs. The approach revolutionized biotech manufacturing and became the standard for cloning proteins in the pharmaceutical industry. Herb Boyer later
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, Levinson was 31 years old. * * * — AFTER THAT, LEVINSON never really looked back—although it wasn’t his intention to someday run an entire company, even Genentech. He preferred science but found himself pulled more and more into the management side of the company, and was quickly run up the corporate ladder
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. In 1989, he became Genentech’s vice president of research technology; a year later, he was named vice president of research, then senior vice president of research and development in
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1993. In 1995, with Boyer’s support on the board, Levinson became Genentech’s president and chief executive officer, and in 1999 he took on the chairmanship. Under his watch, the company developed multiple genetically engineered pharmaceuticals: real
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breast cancer; Tarceva, to treat lung and pancreatic cancer; Esbriet, an anti–pulmonary fibrosis drug; and Cotellic for melanoma. Meanwhile, Genentech’s stock just kept going up. By 2009, though, Genentech had been folded into Roche, a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate, after Levinson arranged a $46.8 billion merger. He was ready to
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spell-check would routinely autocorrect “genome” to “gnome,” as if the fabric of human life were some ugly, knob-faced troll. Even Herb Boyer, at Genentech, thought there was no way the genome would ever be sequenced. It was too complicated and would take forever. And truthfully, in 1986, it was
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a man who could strap it on with the likes of James Watson. But now, 10 years later, while Art Levinson was busily moving up Genentech’s corporate ranks, and Ray Kurzweil was making a national name for himself as one of the country’s most promising inventors, Venter’s career
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his medal, of course. He would be joining 16 other scientists who were also receiving theirs. (One award was posthumous: Bob Swanson, co-founder of Genentech, who had died of brain cancer only a few months earlier.) Craig Venter would not be among the awardees either. He wouldn’t win his
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a good deal of evidence supported the general trends Fantastic Voyage foresaw, even if the timing of it all might be in dispute. For years Genentech, with Art Levinson as CEO and chair, had been “pharming” artificial insulin, human growth hormone, and proteins that attacked cancer and kidney disease—even asthma
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different view of aging. Even as Ray Kurzweil was honing his ideas on age prevention with Terry Grossman, even while Art Levinson continued to grow Genentech into a bigger, more successful biotechnology juggernaut than it already was, and even as Craig Venter was figuring out how to create the first artificial
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was just short of zero. Not that he was entirely clueless. He had, after all, picked up a thing or two during those decades at Genentech. He knew that he, and all that company’s teams of researchers going back to the 1970s, had been playing in the very same molecular
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’s organization, strategy, total required investment. No one had ever tackled anything like this before. Should the operation be a Big Pharma play à la Genentech, or something utterly different? What manner of human beings should he hire? Biochemists, geneticists, gerontologists, molecular biologists, medical doctors, aging experts, a couple of witch
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, that was an entirely different animal. Levinson had to admit that this first hemisphere was more in his personal comfort zone, and more in the Genentech model: Find a disease and then find a drug that could eliminate or reduce its damage. Maybe you couldn’t guarantee people would live 500
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company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases. Art Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer.” The moment the blog hit the wires, press, pundits, geeks, researchers, venture capitalists—everyone in Silicon
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who might make up the company’s leadership. Hal Barron was one of the candidates. He was a Yale Med School cardiologist who had been Genentech’s chief medical officer for 12 years before serving the same role at Roche when the Swiss company bought the remainder of
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Genentech in 2009. Levinson already considered Barron the best drug developer in the world—so when Barron reached out, Levinson immediately asked him to become Calico’
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, an M.D. and oncology specialist, joined the brain trust too. Cohen and Levinson went way back to the early 1990s, where he had helped Genentech and Levinson develop some of their most successful breakthrough cancer drugs. Cohen had a knack for connecting scientific advances that related to human disease. And
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field largely because of a strange and pioneering discovery she had made long before Google and Calico existed—even before Art Levinson rose to become Genentech’s CEO and Craig Venter crashed his way through the HGP. It had to do with, of all things, worms—a particular kind of roundworm
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Project was only one of many undertakings that Venter had simmering throughout the corridors at HLI. Also included were a series of research collaborations with Genentech, the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), and King’s College London. The King’s College connection allowed HLI to get its hands on the genomes
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Extension Foundation J. Craig George, North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management Joon Yun, Palo Alto Investors, LLC Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review Herbert Boyer, Genentech, Inc. David Masci, Pew Research Center Carolyn Funk, Pew Research Center BOOKS Botstein, David. Decoding the Language of Genetics. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2015
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, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Smith Hughes, Sally. Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Venter, J. Craig. A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, Penguin Books, 2008. ———. Life at the
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson · 9 Mar 2021 · 700pp · 160,604 words
component molecules and study their behavior.”11 But first, Doudna stutter-stepped onto an odd career detour. Herbert Boyer and Robert A. Swanson CHAPTER 13 Genentech Restless In the fall of 2008, just after this spate of CRISPR papers had been published, Jillian Banfield told Doudna she was worried that the
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ailing, would be grueling, but she seriously considered it. Then she ran into a former academic colleague who had joined the San Francisco biotech powerhouse Genentech the year before. The company was a poster child for the innovation and profits that can result when basic science meets patent lawyers meet venture
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capitalists. Genentech, Inc. Genentech was spawned in 1972, when Stanford medical professor Stanley Cohen and biochemist Herbert Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco, attended a conference
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first names that sounded like an online dating service or down-market beauty parlor. Boyer wisely rejected that and suggested instead that they call it Genentech, a mash-up of “genetic engineering technology.” It began making genetically engineered drugs and, in August 1978, blasted into hypergrowth when it won a bet
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treat diabetes. Until then, one pound of insulin required eight thousand pounds of pancreas glands ripped from more than twenty-three thousand pigs or cows. Genentech’s success with insulin not only changed the lives of diabetics (and a lot of pigs and cows); it lifted the entire biotechnology industry into
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Diana to be his princess, an event that, in those more rarefied times for journalism, received only a secondary mention on the magazine’s cover. Genentech’s success led to a memorable front page of the San Francisco Examiner in October 1980, when the company became the first biotech company to
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IPO and become publicly traded. Its stock, trading under the symbol GENE, opened at $35 a share and within an hour was selling at $88. “Genentech Jolts Wall Street,” the banner front-page headline blared. Right below it was a picture for a totally separate story: a smiling Paul Berg on
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learning the news that he had, on that same day, won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of recombinant DNA.5 Detour By the time Genentech began recruiting Doudna in late 2008, the company was worth close to $100 billion. Her former colleague, who was now working on genetically engineering cancer
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drugs at Genentech, told her that he was loving his new role. His research was much more focused than when he was an academic, and he was working
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to a place where I could apply my knowledge.” Her first step was to present a couple of seminars at Genentech describing her work. It was a way for her and the Genentech team to sniff each other out. Among those wooing her was Sue Desmond-Hellmann, chief of product development. They
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was being recruited there, she and I sat down in her office and [she] told me she would be my mentor if I came to Genentech,” Doudna says. When Doudna decided to accept the job, she was told she could bring some members of her Berkeley team with her. “We were
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figuring out what equipment we were going to take and had begun packing it all up.”6 But as soon as Doudna began working at Genentech, in January 2009, she realized that she had made a mistake. “I felt very quickly in my gut that I was in the wrong place
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than discoveries. “I didn’t have the right skill set or passions to work at a big company.” But even though her brief stint at Genentech didn’t work out, her desire to tie her research to the creation of practical new tools and companies that could commercialize them would drive
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’s how my mind works. I can see experiments in my mind, especially when I am working myself.” But by 2009, after her return from Genentech, Doudna realized that she had to spend more time cultivating her lab rather than her bacterial cultures. This transition from player to coach happens in
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home studying for her PhD qualifying exam in early 2009 when she heard the news that Doudna had decided to cut short her move to Genentech and return to Berkeley. That was fortunate. Haurwitz had been planning to follow her, but she really wanted to stay at Berkeley and do her
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work he had been doing as an undergraduate at Columbia.4 During that delay, he was surprised to hear about Doudna’s abrupt move to Genentech and even more abrupt rebound. Worried about whether he had made the right choice, he sent her an email asking how committed she was to
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became known as Cas6f. Rachel Haurwitz CHAPTER 15 Caribou Bench to bedside Even though she decided against becoming part of the corporate-science world at Genentech, Doudna retained her desire to translate the basic discoveries about CRISPR into tools that could be useful in medicine. Her opportunity came after Wiedenheft and
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repurpose it for our own uses.”1 For much of the twentieth century, most new drugs were based on chemical advances. But the launch of Genentech in 1976 shifted the focus of commercialization from chemistry to biotechnology, which involves the manipulation of living cells, often through genetic engineering, to devise new
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medical treatments. Genentech became the model for commercializing biotech discoveries: scientists and venture capitalists raised capital by divvying up equity stakes, then they entered into agreements with major
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she did like the idea of being part of a business, especially one that could have a direct impact on people’s health. And unlike Genentech, a startup would have no corporate politics, nor would it drag her away from academia. Haurwitz likewise felt the allure of business. Although she was
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. 23, 2008; Erik Sontheimer, letter of intent, National Institutes of Health, Dec. 29, 2008. 11. Doudna and Sternberg, A Crack in Creation, 62. Chapter 13: Genentech 1. Author’s interviews with Jillian Banfield and Jennifer Doudna. 2. Eugene Russo, “The Birth of Biotechnology,” Nature, Jan. 23, 2003; Mukherjee, The Gene, 230
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; Mukherjee, The Gene, 237. 4. Mukherjee, The Gene, 238. 5. Frederic Golden, “Shaping Life in the Lab,” Time, Mar. 9, 1981; Laura Fraser, “Cloning Insulin,” Genentech corporate history; San Francisco Examiner front page, Oct. 14, 1980. 6. Author’s interview with Rachel Haurwitz. 7. Author’s interview with Jennifer Doudna. Chapter
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, 479 The Double Helix read by, xix, 6–8, 29–31, 157, 328, 391, 397, 398, 414, 459, 477 first marriage of, 54–56, 63 Genentech and, 97–102, 103, 105, 107, 113, 114 on gene therapy, 279 germline editing views of, 331–32, 367–70 at Harvard, 34–35, 40
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yeast, 35, 148–49 ZFNs (zinc-finger nucleases) in, 155, 178, 179 Zhang’s research on, 167, 177–79 see also CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing Genentech, 97–102, 113–14 Doudna and, 97–102, 103, 105, 107, 113, 114 genes, 11–15, 17–19, 46, 478 jumping, 49, 373–76 mutations
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall · 19 Mar 2019 · 393pp · 115,217 words
between the tumor and its host environment underlies targeted therapy, immunotherapy, and nearly every active cancer research program. The company that developed Avastin was called Genentech. Between the day the company first announced the data and the day the FDA approved the drug, its market value increased by $38 billion, a
…
, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, Inside Out, and others. The Pixar story is a marvelous remake. Fifteen years earlier, in 1978, a tiny, profitless company called Genentech, developing an unproven new technology called genetic engineering, which was dismissed by nearly all the incumbent players in the industry, signed a partnership with a
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. Pixar’s technology automated a manual process and allowed animators to create a new kind of film. Genentech’s technology automated a manual process and allowed scientists to create a new kind of drug. Genentech’s public offering was perfectly timed and beautifully marketed, just like Pixar’s. The wildly oversubscribed offering
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October 14, 1980. The stock began trading at 200 percent above bankers’ initial estimates. Pixar’s IPO marked the birth of a new art form. Genentech’s IPO marked the birth of a new industry—the biotechnology industry. The successful offering financed a staggering run of hits: Herceptin (for breast cancer
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), Avastin (for colon, lung, and brain cancers), Rituxan (for blood cancers). Both Genentech and Pixar—like any good drug-discovery company or film studio—learned how to balance both loonshots and franchises because they had to. There are
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no other kinds of products in movies and drugs. In the biotech world, probably no company did it better than Genentech. In 2009, when it was sold to Roche, the company was valued at just over $100 billion. In the film world, probably no studio did
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and trusting in the inventor or artist or any other loonshot champion is not the same as relinquishing attention to detail. The chief executive at Genentech for fourteen years, Art Levinson, was famous—and feared—for his insistence on scientific precision. A few years ago, at the largest annual biotech meeting
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. He sent a message that inspired every scientist in the room. Science matters. Precision matters. I often heard stories from scientist and manager friends at Genentech about Levinson. How he would call a junior technician in the lab, for example, and grill him on his data. Levinson and the early founders
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of Genentech understood, like Bush and Vail, and Catmull decades later, the need to tailor the tools to the phase. Ferocious attention to scientific detail—or artistic
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design—is one tool, tailored to the phase, that motivates excellence among scientists, artists, or any type of creative. Left-handed vs. right-handed DNA Genentech achieved the highest levels of respect from the scientific community. It ranked behind only MIT in the number of citations per paper. It did so
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a handful of entrepreneurs in the early 1980s, who started what became known as biotechnology companies. The success of their initial public offerings—most famously Genentech, described in chapter 5—established a market for a new type of company: one with no revenue, no profits, no sales force, and no certainty
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world, a symbiotic web of partnerships connects the two markets. Many are one-offs. In chapter 5, we saw how a one-off deal helped Genentech survive in its early days (a partnership with Eli Lilly), just like a one-off deal with Disney helped Pixar survive its early days. A
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handful of deals are much broader. The two-decade partnership between Roche, a pharma giant based in Switzerland, and Genentech, which is based in San Francisco, produced probably the greatest string of biotech hits seen in the industry so far. Those hits include the drug
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extracts”: Brown, “Tribute,” 16. Counting the arrows in your ass: Begley; Cooke, Folkman’s War, 180–87, 283–90, 296–99; Ferrara et al.; Folkman; Genentech; Rosenfeld; Stone. Quotations: “go to the bathroom” and “cured cancer again”: Begley. “Spousal Activation Factor” and “clown”: Folkman, “Fine Line,” 4, 13. “Maybe we don
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): 273. Ford, Earl S., et al. “Explaining the Decrease in U.S. Deaths from Coronary Disease, 1980–2000.” New Eng. J. Med. 356 (2007): 2388. Genentech press release. “Positive Results from Phase III Avastin Study in Metastatic Colorectal Cancer,” June 1, 2003. Goldfine, Allison B. “Statins: Is It Really Time to
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-deep”: Kahney. “more emotion and humor”: Schlender, 169. “visually astounding”: Rechtshaffen. “rebirth”: Larsen. “dawn”: Ebert. Movies and drugs and Balancing Ugly Babies and the Beast: Genentech: Hughes, 94–97; Robbins-Roth, 19–22. Bond, monkey: Broccoli, 126–78; Lycett, 393. Quotations: “ill-shapen”: Bacon, 387. “Originality is fragile”: Catmull, 131, 135
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. “not even good enough” and “Limey truck driver”: Broccoli, 128, 177. How to win at chess and Rescue operations: Candor at Pixar: Catmull, 85–105. Genentech publications: Fraser. Jobs 2.0: Isaacson, 293–339; Schlender, 194–248. iTunes: Isaacson, 394–403. Quotations: “I’m not a filmmaker”: Schlender, 333. “left-handed
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Apple Macintosh, Is Dead.” NY Times, Feb. 28, 2005. Estrin, James. “Kodak’s First Digital Moment.” NY Times, Aug. 12, 2015. Fraser, Laura. “The Paper.” Genentech: web.archive.org/web/*/www.gene.com/stories/the-paper. Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris. Baroque Science. U. Chicago, 2013. Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac
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, Michael. Dealers of Lightning. Harper, 1999. Hooke, Robert. Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke. W. Derham, 1726. Hughes, Sally Smith. Genentech. U. Chicago, 2011. Hume, Brit. “Steve Jobs Pulls Ahead of Microsoft Rival in Race for PC Supremacy.” Wash. Post, Oct. 31, 1988. Inwood, Stephen. The
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.” J. Hist. Astr. 1 (1970): 5. Wilson, John W. “Look What Steve Jobs Found at the Movies.” Bus. Week, Feb. 17, 1986, 37. Winslow, Ron. “Genentech’s Levinson Sets the Record Straight on DNA.” WSJ, Jan. 14, 2009. Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz. Norton, 2006. INTERLUDE Death of Smith: Rae
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. Hobson, John M. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge, 2004. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam. U. Chicago, 1974. Hughes, Sally Smith. Genentech. U. Chicago, 2011. Jacob, Margaret C. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. Oxford, 1997. Jaramillo, Laura, and Cemile Sancak. “Why Has the
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Crestor (developed by scientists at Shionogi, now marketed by Astra-Zeneca) have exceeded $50 billion. increased by $38 billion: The change in market value of Genentech between the first announcement of positive results in colon cancer on May 19, 2003, and the FDA approval on February 26, 2004, was $38 billion
…
. $10 billion in annual sales: Revenues based on US sales only (excluding royalties on ex-US sales) in the last full year before Genentech was acquired by Roche (Genentech 2008 annual report). INTERLUDE both emergent properties: In The Self-Organizing Economy, which describes connections between economics and the science of emergence, Paul
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, thumb-twiddling Friendster, False Fail of Futureworld Galambos, Louis Galileo “gardener, not a Moses” gas-mask puzzle Gates, Bill Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) Gell-Mann, Murray Genentech compared with Pixar See also Avastin genetic engineering (protein drugs) Gladwell, Malcolm GlaxoSmithKline Gleevec Goddard, Robertn Goldstein, Joseph Goldwasser, Eugene Google and Android engineering group
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of dominance then decline. See also world history (comparative) science in. See also Aryabhata insulin Intel invisible hand, as an emergent property Invisible Axe IPO, Genentech and Pixar, compared irreversible binder (piranha) drugs Isaacson, Walter ISIS Islamic empire dominance then decline. See also world history (comparative) science in use of Marāgha
…
companies and “when systems snap” See also magic number; Invisible Axe phases of organizations PIC (Pixar Image Computer) piranha (irreversible binder) drugs Pixar compared with Genentech See also Catmull; Jobs; Luxo Jr. polarized light Polaroid, see Land Polavision (instant-print video) compared with Boeing 747 and NeXT Cube Post-it Notes
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019
of a fresh set of offerings from the growing field of biotechnology, notably the Northern California–based Genentech, a firm co-founded by Stanford and University of California scientists and Silicon Valley VCs. Although Genentech had made a profit in only one year of its four-year history, dealmakers salivated at the
…
researchers to commercialize inventions that sprang from government-funded research—a move of particular benefit to the health sciences. The prospects for biotechnological commercialization made Genentech seem like only the tip of a very large iceberg.5 Biotechnology was profoundly different from computer hardware and software—it was far more anchored
…
, was more tightly regulated, and had much slower product development cycles—but investors rightly recognized that the two sectors shared the same venture-capital DNA. Genentech in fact owed its existence to Eugene Kleiner and his venture partner Tom Perkins, who had adapted an “incubation” model of recruiting young associates, then
…
giving them a mandate to hunt down promising tech and build new companies around it. When Genentech went public on October 14, trading opened at $35 a share and shot upward to a peak of $88 only an hour later. It was
…
history. Yet the spike was brief, and the stock ended up at only a few more dollars than its initial valuation. The IPO had made Genentech’s founders rich, but it hadn’t been as good to other investors.6 Observing disapprovingly that most Wall Street brokerages still lacked analysts with
…
enough knowledge to properly understand either tech or biotech, “or to put proper valuations on these issues,” BusinessWeek quickly pronounced Genentech “the perfect example of how investors can overreact to a stock.” Yet company co-founder Bob Swanson recognized something else at work as well. “The
…
CHAPTER 14 California Dreaming Three things happening in quick succession in the second half of 1980—the euphoria over Apple, the stunning biotech debut of Genentech, and the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency—marked the start of a new, and even more intense, phase of America’s
…
Amazon. Google went public in August of that year, “one of Wall Street’s most eagerly awaited births ever,” declared Fortune, apparently forgetting how Intel, Genentech, and Apple once had set the Street atwitter. By December, the stock had doubled in price, to $165; two years later, it neared $300. Google
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readers interested in learning more about biotech’s origins and evolution, a good place to start is Sally Smith Hughes’s excellent Genentech (2011). In Troublemakers, Leslie Berlin discusses Genentech as well as the important role of Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, an innovator in technology transfer, which helped turn medical
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, D1. 6. Ben Rosen, “Spectacular Year for Electronics Stocks,” The Rosen Electronics Letter 80, no. 21 (December 31, 1980), 1. Also see Sally Smith Hughes, Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). 7. Robert A. Swanson, oral history interviews by Sally Smith Hughes, 1996 and 1997
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, 273–76, 285, 312, 322, 339–46, 349–51, 366, 368, 375, 377, 391, 402, 408, 409 Gates, Mary, 228–29, 275 Gates, Melinda, 402 Genentech, 179–80, 191, 366 General Electric (GE), 11, 14, 25, 31, 59 General Magic, 317, 376 General Micro-electronics, 97 General Motors (GM), 161, 268
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