Synopses & Reviews
In the fall of 1980, Genentech, Inc., a little-known California genetic engineering company, became the overnight darling of Wall Street, raising over $38 million in its initial public stock offering. Lacking marketed products or substantial profit, the firm nonetheless saw its share price escalate from $35 to $89 in the first few minutes of trading, at that point the largest gain in stock market history. Coming at a time of economic recession and declining technological competitiveness in the United States, the event provoked banner headlines and ignited a period of speculative frenzy over biotechnology as a revolutionary means for creating new and better kinds of pharmaceuticals, untold profit, and a possible solution to national economic malaise. Drawing from an unparalleled collection of interviews with early biotech players, Sally Smith Hughes offers the first book-length history of this pioneering company, depicting Genentech’s improbable creation, precarious youth, and ascent to immense prosperity. Hughes provides intimate portraits of the people significant to Genentech’s science and business, including cofounders Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and in doing so sheds new light on how personality affects the growth of science. By placing Genentech’s founders, followers, opponents, victims, and beneficiaries in context, Hughes also demonstrates how science interacts with commercial and legal interests and university research, and with government regulation, venture capital, and commercial profits. Integrating the scientific, the corporate, the contextual, and the personal, Genentech tells the story of biotechnology as it is not often told, as a risky and improbable entrepreneurial venture that had to overcome a number of powerful forces working against it.
Review
"Sally Smith Hughes skillfully describes the improbable creation, difficult adolescence, immense prosperity, and eventual foundering of Genentech, the first biotech behemoth. It’s a great tale, with a cast of fabulous characters and surprising episodes, ranging from Palo Alto to Wall Street. This is an outstanding book that should appeal to Nobel laureates as well as hedge-fund barons and ordinary citizens.”
Review
“My first job out of my postdoc was at Genentech in early 1981. At the time, I had no idea that all those guys in suits were doing something that had never been done before. But I did know the science was amazing—and Bob Swanson was the clear leader in creating an environment that supported that science. Sally Smith Hughes has brought to life the details of what the key players were up to—they werent playing it safe, and they created a catalytic environment that generated a whole new industry.”
Review
“Sally Smith Hughes’s book on the formative years of Genentech helps fill a gaping hole in the history of biotechnology, as it grew out of the recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s and 1980s. This book covers the quake from its epicenter. It draws on two decades of research, thousands of conversations, hundreds of documents, and dozens of oral history interviews. This zippy read will be welcomed by those who care about the San Francisco Bay area, biotechnology, the history of molecular biology, and high-tech economic development. Genentech has long had its legends, statues, buildings, and view of Candlestick Park; now it has a book about its beginnings.”
Review
“Drawing extensively on oral histories, Hughes reveals the day-to-day hands-on roles of both the venture capitalists and the scientists, their eyes fixed at once on scientific triumphs and corporate riches, who brought Genentech to life. Hughes vividly recounts the tough-minded deals, buccaneering strategies, laboratory struggles, and relentless patent arrangements that not only made for Genentechs success but that pioneered the new biotechnology industrys operational model.”
Review
“Hughes has crafted an engaging historical account of Genentech from its beginnings as a small laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco to the 2009 merger with Roche for 47 billion dollars. . . . [Her] account will appeal to a broad audience and is a must read for scholars interested in the history of biotechnology. Highly recommended.”
Review
“[A]n important addition to the history of biotech.”
Review
“Over the past 20 years Sally Smith Hughes has done a great service to science studies by conducting in-depth oral-history interviews with prominent scientists, venture capitalists, corporate leaders, and attorneys in the history and business of early biotechnology. She drew on her unprecedented access to corporate records and a large number of actors and their oral histories to write
Genentech, the first comprehensive account of the creation and early development of the Genentech Corporation.”
Review
“The author skillfully reveals the practical, day-to-day, hands-on roles played by venture capitalists focused on fiscal gain and scientists focused on scientific breakthroughs. . . . [A] fascinating read.”
Review
“[A]n eminently readable (and, for classes, eminently assignable) story . . . . Smith Hughes is one of the foremost oral historians of science today, and Genentech is filled with illuminating interview snippets woven artfully into a narrative that both engages and (somewhat surreptitiously) analyzes. . . . [F]or a case study that lays out in lively detail the ambiguities and exuberances of high-tech entrepreneurship, Smith Hughes’s Genentech surely ranks among the very best.”
Review
“[A] fascinating book, vividly recount[ing] the blood, sweat, and tears of the early days of ‘genetic engineers working at the bench, designing new biomolecules, and capitalizing their promises on Wall Street.”
Review
“Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech paints a wonderfully detailed picture of an important beginning in the history of biotechnology.”
Review
“Hughess Genentech makes an invaluable international contribution to understanding how a period just short of a decade redefined ‘business as usual for biologists.”
Review
and#8220;Yiand#8217;s masterwork is a welcome deep-sequencing of how the double helix, DNA, gave rise to the triple helixand#8212;university-industry-government relations at the dawn of modern biotechnology. He burrows under the mythology and hero stories to find a rich story suffused with conflict long buried under the dollars that washed through biotechnology as it aspired to and then succeeded in joining established pharmaceutical manufacturers. Recombinant DNA was one of the root technologies, and Stanfordand#8217;s biochemistry department was its breeding ground of a seminal technology of the twentieth century.and#160; Yiand#8217;s story traces how a science department changed the world, for better or for worse, or a bit of both.and#8221;
Review
andquot;The Recombinant University broadens the interpretive framework within which the beginnings of biotechnology are understood. Yi places the technical developments in biochemistry and molecular biology that made possible genetic engineering and the industrial and commercial development of biotechnology in an evolving relationship with legal, economic, and political changes from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. He presents a particularly illuminating portrait of the evolution of the Stanford Biochemistry Department, giving us a specific and detailed feel for the dilemmas, motives, and limitations of these scientists in grappling with the possibilities of commercialization.andquot;
Review
andquot;The Recombinant University takes a fresh look at how genetic engineering was transformed from a research tool into an object of private investment and commercial returns. At the center of Doogab Yiandrsquo;s probing analysis lies the question of the realignment between commercial enterprise and academic institutions, private ownership and public benefit of academic research. A historical understanding of these developments offers a timely and indispensable contribution to current discussions on the value and future of scientific research and public universities.andquot;
Review
andquot;A valuable close-up of life science at Stanford in the 1970s, immersing the reader in the scene where so much of early gene splicing took shape.andquot;
Synopsis
The advent of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s was a key moment in the history of both biotechnology and the commercialization of academic research. Doogab Yiand#8217;s
The Recombinant University draws us deeply into the academic community in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the technology was developed and adopted as the first major commercial technology for genetic engineering. In doing so, it reveals how research patronage, market forces, and legal developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s influenced the evolution of the technology and reshaped the moral and scientific life of biomedical researchers.
Bay Area scientists, university administrators, and government officials were fascinated by and increasingly engaged in the economic and political opportunities associated with the privatization of academic research. Yi uncovers how the attempts made by Stanford scientists and administrators to demonstrate the relevance of academic research were increasingly mediated by capitalistic conceptions of knowledge, medical innovation, and the public interest. Their interventions resulted in legal shifts and moral realignments that encouraged the privatization of academic research for public benefit. The Recombinant University brings to life the hybrid origin story ofand#160; biotechnology and the ways the academic culture of science has changed in tandem with the early commercialization of recombinant DNA technology.
About the Author
Sally Smith Hughes is a historian of science at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Virus: A History of the Concept and the creator of an extensive collection of in-depth oral histories on bioscience, biomedicine, and biotechnology.
Table of Contents
PrologueAcknowledgments1/ 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 Issues
4 / Human Insulin: Genentech Makes its Mark Seeking Corporate Contracts
Procuring a Facility and Staff
Genentech’s Human Insulin Project The Eli Lilly Contract Publicity and Expansion
5 / Human Growth Hormone: Shaping a Commercial Future Competing for Human Growth Hormone
Moving toward Corporate Integration
Scaling Up Insulin and Growth Hormone Corporate Expansion An Emerging Culture
6 / Wall Street Debut Biomania
Exit Strategies
Interferon: The New Wonder Drug? Run-up to an Initial Public Offering Legal Impediments The IPO
EpilogueNotesBibliographyOral History BibliographyIndex