The Faces Behind Biotech

If biotechnology is San Diego’s new, high-risk upstart industry, the people who provide its brains, heart and soul are upstarts, too.

They are stoked by altruism, by the thrill of scientific discovery or by the potential for striking financial pay dirt through the delivery of a new miracle drug to an ailing world.

Some are visionary executives driven both by a scientific mission and an entrepreneurial spirit. Sci - entrepreneurs , if you will.

They’re people like 42-year-old David Hale, who is pioneering his third biotech company in San Diego and who, appropriately enough, lives in the Rancho Bernardo neighborhood called The Trails.

Some are the hard-core scientists, like 51-year-old Bill Ripka of Scripps Ranch, whose search for ways to control blood clots will be monitored by fellow practitioners and academicians in science journals, as well as by corporate executives concerned about profit-and-loss statements.

Some are wealthy venture capitalists, people with a special blend of nerve and patience, like 64-year-old Theo Heinrichs of Marin County, who has invested $25 million in San Diego’s biotech industry and who maintains a year-round hotel room at the Sheraton Grande in Torrey Pines so he can visit the companies he has helped stake--even if the rewards may be 10 years off.

And there are the starry-eyed, postgraduates-cum-lab technicians, the grunts on the front lines, who cut short their dinner dates to check on lab experiments.

People like 26-year-old Regina McFadden, who remembers her first day in a commercial biotech lab. “I hoped I wouldn’t forget what I learned, or how to look through a microscope, or how to do a tissue culture. And on that first day, I remembered it all, and I thought, ‘Wow! I really love this!’ ”

These are the people who bring the character and personality to San Diego’s newest and perhaps least understood community--one found not on the corner of some map, but on the cutting edge of medical science.

THE SCIENTISTS

Bill Ripka considers himself a born-again scientist.

For 25 years, Ripka was a medium-size fish in a very big pond, working as a research chemist in the central research department at Du Pont, a kind of science supermarket that developed everything from floor polishes to fabrics, paints to medicines.

“In the ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s, places like Bell Labs, AT&T; and Du Pont were exciting places to work. They were run by scientists with a sense of purpose, a commitment to enlarge the scientific base,” Ripka said.

But in time, the scientific mission shifted to one of bottom-line profits, he said. Initiative was sapped; scientists were told not to research the unknown, but to improve the existing product lines.

Science, he said, became a job of making widgets, not a journey of discovery.

“I saw myself getting complacent. I was losing my spark,” the 51-year-old Ripka said.

So last year, he became a very big fish in a specialized science delicatessen, joining a small biotech firm in Torrey Pines called Corvas, which is designing drugs to control the formation of blood clots.

He and his wife moved from Wilmington, Del., to Scripps Ranch for the chance to personally design new drugs, and to help build a new company.

It was, he said, the rebirth of the scientist that lurked in his soul.

He left a mega-lab staffed by 2,000 Ph.D.s and 2,000 other lab technicians for a company with all of 35 employees.

“Now I’m surrounded, again, by driven people, people with visions and dreams, and where we can see the results of our work,” said Ripka.

Today, he uses a computer to design the molecular structure of hypothetical drug compounds before they are actually constructed in the lab--not unlike a car designer who uses a computer before building a prototype.

In a company as small as Corvas, Ripka can share ideas with other scientists in the next room. “At Du Pont, there was the sense that everything had to filter through lawyers and MBAs. There were meetings after meetings, deciding absolutely nothing.

“And at Du Pont, no matter what you did, it was impossible to stand out. Scientists work the hours they do for the recognition that they’ve done a good job and have advanced the science. But at a place as large as Du Pont, you couldn’t get that kind of singular recognition. At Du Pont, if you synthesized a new chemical, it would go to another group, and to another group after that, and ultimate credit for success would go to the officers of the company.

“If I got excited about something I discovered, before I could tell someone, I’d have to make an appointment with his secretary,” Ripka said.

Now, at Corvas, the small cadre of scientists share in one another’s discoveries--and frustrations.

Is he having fun yet? “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m recharged.”

Ron Evans’ wife of 10 years is Ellen.

His mistress of 13 years is his laboratory at the Salk Institute.

“I love my work. The biggest compromise to it is having a family. My family comes first. I love my family. There’s no doubt about that,” Evans said. “But it’s also a challenge because my presence is in my laboratory. I love being at work. Before I got married, I spent my days--every day--and all night in the lab.”

Evans, who is on the faculty at the Salk, looks around at the others he knows who are in the business of basic, scientific research. “We’re dedicated to science. It’s an all-consuming process. Science becomes part of the individual, the idea of pure, intellectual discovery, the challenge, and the competition against great minds.

“It’s wonderful.”

Evans, 42, who grew up in Los Angeles and got his Ph.D. in microbiology at UCLA, is researching molecular mechanisms and how genes direct the body’s development. Discoveries in this field will lead to understanding not only how the embryo develops into the mature, healthy adult human, but how to conquer diseases that manifest themselves in genes gone awry, he said.

“One of the critical questions for much of this century is, what is the basis, at the molecular level, for development?” Evans said. “It was understood relatively early on that it must involve mechanisms that control gene expression. That’s been a driving force, a driving question in biology, for decades. It certainly is one of the most actively studied areas in all of biology.”

Central to that question is how hormones influence cellular specialization--that is, not only why some cells become muscle cells and others become brain cells, but how even cells within the muscle tissue are directed by the DNA to perform this or that function, or to produce this or that chemical as its specific assignment in the body’s cascading chemical reaction.

“Every hormone, every neurotransmitter, every growth factor, has a comparable receptor--a protein with a complementary structure to the hormone that detects its presence,” Evans said.

“It’s like the microprocessor in a computer. Each receptor on a cell can indicate a change in the cellular environment, and activate or access a different program--a genetic program that allows the cell to respond appropriately.

“How you address that program, how you decipher the mechanics of that process, is like trying to understand the circuitry of a computer,” Evans said. “It’s a challenging and immensely, enormously complex puzzle, and one which is at the key of understanding not only the basis of how we become unique individuals, but the key to understanding disease, and the key in identifying drugs and techniques that will help us treat human disease.”

Like many other scientists who are steeped in basic research, Evans is trying to develop his discoveries commercially. In his case, he is a consultant and head of the scientific advisory board of Ligand Pharmaceuticals, a La Jolla biotech company using some of his research to develop pharmaceutical alternatives to natural hormones and vitamins for the treatment of certain cancers, heart disease, inflammation and osteoporosis.

“As scientists, we have an obligation to further the technology, further the science, and to put it into a practical format so it can be accessed,” Evans said.

“But it’s not the role of a basic research institute to, by itself, commercialize the technology. We do have a responsibility, though, to see that it happens, so the discoveries can get into the mainstream of society.”

For Evans, who lives in La Jolla and relaxes through swimming, tennis and gardening, science still offers a sense of wonder and amazement.

“I’ve never lost my fascination with biology, its complexity and its challenge,” he said. “That’s part of the magic that keeps people in it, and which keeps the intensity level to the point where you can achieve something special.”

Like many other biotech scientists toiling in San Diego, Mary Harper says she’s at risk of losing sight of the awe and wonder of the science because of the routine of daily regimens.

“We get so involved in it, we don’t stop and think that much about it,” she said. “It becomes rather matter-of-fact. Sometimes we’re surprised, or even elated, by a particular finding or discovery, but I don’t think we’re really in awe of it.”

Harper, who has a Ph.D., remembers meeting her husband, fellow scientist John Harper, while both were working at the M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston.

“You work all the time,” she recalled. “We’d go to my apartment, fix dinner and go back to the lab until midnight.

“Having a husband who’s a scientist helps. He understands when you have to go to the lab on Saturdays and Sundays, or stop on the way to dinner to check on a gel.”

Today, John Harper works at Telios Pharmaceuticals, which is developing drugs to promote skin wound healing and to make implants and protheses more biocompatible.

And Mary Harper works at Genta, specifically studying how drugs can instruct genes not to replicate the herpes virus. Much of her time is spent testing candidate compounds to see what success they have in killing the herpes virus in monkey cells.

Not exactly cocktail party fodder.

“When we socialize, we don’t talk about what we do,” she said. “But when people find out, they say, ‘Gee, you don’t act like a scientist. You’re just like a regular person.’ ”

THE EXECUTIVES

Running a biotech company may be something akin to walking the high wire: You’re footed on the treacherous premise that a particular new medicine can be developed, and you’re balanced by the team of scientists you’ve gathered on the one hand, and the money you’ve raised to keep the project going, on the other. Then, if and when you get to the other side of the chasm, you hope there’s someone there--a marketplace--to embrace you.

For Tom Adams, the biggest challenge is the high wire itself, the testing of theories that will carry the company forward--theories that some weeks can be threadbare.

“Every week, we come up with a new Theory of the Week, and by Friday we’ve destroyed it. So much is unknown in this field--and the prospects are so exciting,” said Adams, who is president of his second company, Genta.

The firm, with 25 employees, operates in leased laboratories on the sprawling, secured grounds of General Atomics, just north of UC San Diego. The company is pursuing “antisense technology,” developing a new class of medicines that will inhibit the production of disease-causing proteins at the messenger RNA level, thereby--hopefully--inhibiting the start of diseases literally at their root. Traditional drugs typically work to neutralize the offensive proteins after they are already produced.

Genta’s line of proposed drugs, if successful, could lead to the cure of such viruses as AIDS, hepatitis, herpes, influenza and even the common cold.

“I’m a scientist-businessman,” said Adams, the 47-year-old Rancho Santa Fe resident. “The science is more fun. It’s an intellectual challenge. But the process of building a technological enterprise like this is a lot of fun, too. I’ve got the best of both worlds, working with extremely bright, creative and hard-working people, tackling problems that most people think are impossible.”

For 10 years, David Hale was steeped in one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical houses, Johnson & Johnson, selling its products to doctors. In 1982, he was recruited to run the marketing efforts at Hybritech, which was developing and applying monoclonal antibodies to medical diagnostic kits to more quickly and accurately detect such things as cancer and pregnancy.

Hale was elevated to president, making his name as a hot biotech executive while the young company reigned as San Diego’s premier biotech success story.

In 1987, he met a couple of UCSD researchers while speaking at a self-help symposium for start-up biotech firms, and he was smitten by their plans to develop new drugs.

So enamored was he, in fact, that he left Hybritech and its 800 employees to help start and oversee the new company, Gensia. As one of just four employees at the time, “I was carrying out my own garbage,” he said.

Gensia’s plan is to develop new medicines to treat cardiovascular disease, stroke and neurological diseases such as epilepsy. Medicines are now being tested on volunteers in clinical studies, and he hopes the drugs may be on the market in three or four years.

“I took a 30% to 40% salary cut, and there certainly was a risk that the company would flop, or not attract enough money to make the technology work,” he said.

“People don’t realize the tremendous amount of energy it takes to build a business. You tell your kids and friends, ‘I’ll see you in a few years.’ ”

But Hale and people like him talk of the downstream rewards.

“There’s certainly a potential of financial reward that can be substantial,” he said. “And there’s the sheer delight of building a business from the ground up, of taking a technology and developing a product that can treat disease.”

Dr. David Katz was a scientist who wanted to see his ideas get in the marketplace. He was chairman of the department of cellular immunology for five years at the Scripps Institute, but he felt hamstrung.

“I wanted to make a contribution. I enjoyed the clinical aspects of my work, and the research side fascinated me. We were actually re-engineering the human body. And I wanted to make something better for human health care.

“I was naive and altruistic. I thought it would be a slam-dunk, that the world would beat a path to your doorstep for your contributions. Wrong.”

He found that other companies didn’t necessarily gobble up the discoveries of research institutes. Scientists call it the Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

To facilitate that transfer of technology from basic research lab to the commercial arena, Katz in 1981 established the Medical Biology Institute for in-house research, and Quidel as its commercial arm. Today, the two have more than 300 employees, and already the partnership has marketed a pregnancy testing kit and other diagnostic kits under Katz’s tutelage.

Katz then spun off another company, Lidak, to develop and market a topical drug to address herpes and other viruses that attack the skin. Look to the small pharmaceutical companies, Katz says, to come up with the new drugs--medicines that ultimately will be acquired and marketed by the large companies.

“You need a lot of roll-up-the-sleeves guys who want to succeed, who are focused and competitive and who want to explore new science,” said 48-year-old Katz.

“AIDS will be historical shortly after the year 2000. But we’ll be hit with new viruses.

“Lots of valuable discoveries don’t get made because people don’t explore, they don’t pursue the fantasy of adventure, they don’t ask, ‘Why not?’ You tell me something can’t be done, and, just on principle, I’ll show you you’re wrong.”

The vast majority of biotech companies in San Diego are working in human health care. But one of the region’s most successful is instead applying the science to crop production.

It is Mycogen. Its president, Jerry Caulder, came out of the ranks of a traditional chemical company, Monsanto.

Caulder remembers living in Colombia in 1971, using the jungles as a “spray-and-pray” testing ground for what would later become Monsanto’s popular herbicide, Round-Up.

But he grew sensitive to the public’s emerging concern about environmental degradation caused by traditional agricultural poisons.

He remembers being told in 1975 that scientists could move a gene from one species to another, and he saw the ramifications: that natural toxins to some insects--biodegradeable toxins that occur in limited circumstances in nature--could be bred in test tubes and applied on vegetation, without causing harm to the environment.

“It turned out that nature was a better chemist than we gave it credit for,” Caulder said. “It was just a matter of discovering that, and learning how to use it.”

So he recommended that Monsanto invest in new companies focusing their efforts on genetically manufactured, and seemingly safe-and-sane, toxins, the new approach to combatting crop pests.

“I was summarily rejected,” he said.

Given his interest in the field, and the business experience he garnered at Monsanto, Caulder was recruited as the first president and chief executive officer of Mycogen, located in Sorrento Valley.

Among biotech scientists in San Diego, Mycogen is as respected as any biotech firm in the region--even if it is addressing the pathology of plants, not people.

While San Diego’s biotech firms have yet to introduce a single therapeutic medicine to the medical marketplace, because of the years it takes to win U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, Mycogen already has products in place on the nation’s farms, approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as new-age pesticides.

“We’ll probably prevent more cancer than the other firms in San Diego will cure, because our pesticides are safe. But we just kill bugs. Big deal,” Caulder joked. “People would rather talk about a cure for AIDS or heart disease, not a better tomato.”

But within biotech’s ranks, Mycogen’s achievements are widely known, and Caulder is considered an industry leader. He is also one of biotech’s front-line cheerleaders.

“Very seldom do you get the opportunity in your life to be on the ground floor of a technological revolution, to create products that have such social implications,” he said.

“To see the enthusiasm of people making things work is worth getting up in the morning, just to watch as a spectator.

“As an industry, biotech in San Diego is still losing money,” Caulder said. “But we take a lot of pride in the fact that we’re daring to be successful.”

THE TECHNICIANS

If there’s a stereotype of the lab technician who has spent his lifetime cloistered away in the science lab, don’t look to John Harvey as an example.

He’s a one-time intelligence officer for the National Security Agency, as a German and Russian linguist. He’s an artist who works in acrylic and watercolors. He plays guitar, a throwback to school days when he jammed with Jerry Garcia, who later would form the Grateful Dead.

Today he’s a 59-year-old grandfather, wears his thinning, gray hair in a ponytail, and lives in Escondido with his wife of nine years.

“When the last child (from a previous marriage) left home, we took off our clothes and ran around the house naked,” he said.

Harvey more typically spends his days formulating encasements for genetically engineered, nontoxic pesticides manufactured by Mycogen. If he’s not a scientist by academic degree, he’s achieved that level by the experience he’s gained in the trenches of labs around the country.

For 21 years, he worked in the traditional agri-chemical industry, helping research and develop traditional, oil-based pesticides.

“I got bored and tired of that,” he said. “I don’t feel good about the chemical industry because of their hesitancy to do the research necessary to do their jobs better. They’d just research a product far enough to sell it, but wouldn’t go the extra mile to improve it. They just wanted to get a product in the marketplace. They were always rushing.”

Harvey got three bachelor’s degrees from Whittier College--in chemistry, math and language--and a master’s degree at Iowa State University in theoretical physical chemistry. He pursued a Ph.D. in molecular genetics at Texas A&M;, but never completed it.

Instead, he worked for a variety of different companies--once, in Montana, as a consultant in an oil field, helping develop fluids to better lubricate drills.

In 1989, he took a job at Mycogen, where he’s using his expertise in surface physics to help figure out better ways to encase pesticides so they can be applied on plants without injuring the plant itself, but still lure insects to their deaths.

“It’s an intellectual rush, this challenge to come up with a way to get the toxins onto the plant in a totally natural, nontoxic package, and to keep them stable until they’re consumed by the bugs,” Harvey said.

While testing one product, he is already busy developing new ones.

“This is an ongoing science. You never run out of new ideas, new approaches,” he said. “Do I have a dream? Well, we all fantasize to some extent. It would be nice to win a Nobel Prize. But that will never happen. I’m doing the mundane stuff.”

Sam Gillett is among the newest and youngest in biotech’s ranks, one of the grunts in the lab who make between $20,000 and $30,000 a year, roughly a third of what Ph.D. scientists will earn.

He was smitten by science as a youngster, cleaning pennies in window cleaner and wondering what was occurring chemically. The 26-year-old graduated last summer with a master’s degree in chemistry from UC San Diego, and now works for the university’s department of medicine.

On his white lab coat he wears collector pins: one from the San Diego Zoo; one from the Soviet Union, featuring the face of Lenin, and one of Our Gang’s Buckwheat. On a shelf above his desk is a Pez candy dispenser.

Day in, day out, he’s trying to construct, through organic synthesis, novel molecules that his bosses think may possess the properties and characteristics beneficial to treating arthritis. They draw the proposed molecule on paper, and he tries to give it to them in a test tube.

He’s immersed in things he can’t see, but can visualize thanks to computer printouts of charts showing molecular mass based on spectrometry, or graphs depicting the magnetic resonance of the molecule’s nucleus.

“I could be here till I’m 40 and not have made a critical difference in medicine,” he said. “But failure isn’t the right word to use for that, because everything you learn leads to something else.

“What really fascinates me is that someday I may have the entire world’s supply of a particular compound. Wow, what a feeling that would be. And then, what if I sneezed on it?” he laughed.

For 25-year-old Regina McFadden, the journey into biotechnology began with a plastic toy microscope she got in first grade, and family outings to the banks of Lake Murray, where she collected cattails and tadpoles, snake skins and shells.

Today, she’s inside a research laboratory in Torrey Pines studying the kidney cells of the African green monkey.

She graduated from Patrick Henry High School, where she was the captain of the cheerleading squad and the prom queen, and from UCSD, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology.

“I wanted to be a scientist more than a movie star,” she beams.

It means spending Saturdays and Sundays in the lab to finish experiments while her friends take off without her. It means a little less time playing her flute and the piano. But, hey, it’s science, so those personal sacrifices aren’t even an issue, she says.

Unlike prom night’s last dance, or a football game’s final whistle, science doesn’t have an end. And that’s what she likes.

“It’s something that you’ll never have the final answer to,” she said, grinning. “People who don’t understand science may think that it’s always the same, that it’s monotonous. But there’s always something to challenge you.”

She remembers her first day on the job at Lidak Pharmaceuticals, where she maintains a sterile environment to breed particular cell lines in order to study their effects on bacteria and viruses. On that first day, she was awash with the memory of university professors discussing staining, assays, plaques, cells and disease--even how to properly look into a microscope.

Now, suddenly, she had arrived, in a lab filled by Ph.D.s and M.D.s, not students. They were investigating ways to repair the human body through medicines too new to be included in a college text.

“It was such an honor, just being in that lab,” she said. “One day I’m in college. Then I’m a scientist, and I’m making a contribution.

“I hoped I wouldn’t forget what I learned, of how to look through a microscope, or how to do a tissue culture. And on that first day, I remembered it all, and I thought, ‘Wow! I really love this!’ ”

THE INVESTORS

For all the altruism that might be associated with biotechnology, all the excitement of its scientific discovery, Brook Byers cuts quickly and matter-of-factly to the bottom line.

“The markets are enormous.”

So why aren’t more investors like himself joining the ante?

“The risks are enormous, too,” he said.

Byers is a venture capitalist, someone who will risk millions of his investors’ money on normally cautious, conservative scientists who are willing to leave comfortable posts at universities, institutions and large companies and strike out on their own in their quest for a new cure--and for riches.

“They’re eccentric. And that’s what makes them fun,” Byers said. “They’re at the cutting edge. There’s no normalcy to them. There’s nothing normal about this whole thing, biotech. We’re all risk takers. It takes three to four years to get a diagnostic product on the market, and eight or longer for a therapeutic drug. The risk-taking is enormous.”

So while the scientists risk their ideas, and the CEOs risk their careers, it takes people like Brook Byers to risk the money. Millions of dollars. Tens of millions.

Byers, 45, who lives in San Francisco, helped found Hybritech, the flagship of the local biotech industry, in 1978. His company, Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, has since backed five more biotech firms, for a total investment of $30 million, in San Diego.

His investment career began in 1972, with start-up computer, software and telecommunications firms. He could speak the language, with bachelor’s degrees from Georgia Tech in both electrical engineering and physics.

In 1978, he became excited about the medical business.

“The markets are enormous,” Byers said. “Just pull out a text and look at the incidence of disease, and calculate what it costs to treat them, and the value of the drug to cure it, and the savings to society. That’s not the hard part. The business analysis is pretty straightforward.

“The hard part is making the science work. That’s the risk.”

Biotech is the riskiest of start-up companies--more so, say, than computer and software companies, Byers says.

“Biological science is less defined than the physical sciences, and filled with more surprises. And the regulatory gauntlet is not only expensive but time-consuming. You take a drug out of the lab and put it into a system as complex as the human body, and there are going to be surprises.”

Byers counts off the challenges in funding a biotech start-up company--and keeping it afloat: recruit a chief executive officer who is savvy in the pharmaceutical business and who can nurture the scientists. Develop partnerships between the local firm and large corporations to ensure future financial backing and marketing outlets. Help make strategic decisions on product development.

And have the patience to wait up to 10 years for the hoped-for payoff, to make a “hit.”

“Every morning in the shower, I mentally run through my companies and wonder, what’s the most important thing I can do today to move these companies forward?” Byers said. “It takes 20 people per product project. Twenty people in a lab costs $3 million a year. So time becomes the enemy. How can you move the science forward, faster and faster? What new technologies can I learn by reading the (science and medical) journals? How quickly can I link up a company with a corporate partner?

“We tell our scientists, we’re not here to publish papers. We’re here to get a product into development, to cure something, to take risks. Let’s try three things at once, and whichever one works, we’ll throw out the other two. We’ve installed a sense of urgency,” he said.

“Biotech is a new business form.”

Jim Berglund was first an optometrist, then the president of two different companies that manufacture contact lenses. Today he’s investing money in biotechnology.

It provides him, he says, with a rush of excitement.

“Biotechnology is at the leading edge of an important--a terribly important--industry. We’re dealing with people who are at the leading edge of advanced thought, of how to better define disease, and how to treat it,” he said. “And what’s happening in biotechnology is more revolutionary than evolutionary.”

Berglund is a partner with La Jolla-based Enterprise Partners, which has invested in a number of other high-tech businesses in San Diego. Now it has entered the biotech arena, investing $1.5 million in Ligand.

“These businesses are different than computer companies, where a new breakthrough will have broad applications across the board,” Berglund said. “In biotech, any one breakthrough may only help cure a subset of a disease. The application can be quite narrow.

“So I don’t think it’s just the money that motivates them, the chance for a big hit. They may not identify it as such, but I think there’s some altruism there at work, too.”

Theo Heinrichs is a strictly no-nonsense investor.

“I always ask my people, what have you done for me today?” says the man who has staked $25 million in San Diego biotech.

Heinrichs, 64, has been in the pharmaceutical business since 1950. He has headed Cutter Laboratories and Miles Laboratories, among others. He retired in 1984, only to begin investing in small start-up firms.

“What is difficult to accomplish in the large companies are possible with the small,” Heinrichs said. “It fascinates me to work with young people and create something new.”

In San Diego, he has helped fund eight new biotech firms. To protect his investment, he takes some form of control over the firm--either as a director or as chief executive officer.

He visits his companies so routinely that he maintains a year-round room at the pricey Sheraton Grande hotel on Torrey Pines Road: a second-floor room at the end of the wing commanding a spectacular view of the golf course and the Pacific.

Commanding is part of Heinrichs’ vocabulary at work as well. He seldom lets the scientist he’s backing run his own show.

“If he’s got a good idea, I may say, ‘That’s fascinating, but you will not manage this company yourself. You can manage the research.’ These people have to subordinate their ego for sake of the idea, and to accept other people’s management of their concept.

“Very often egos get in the way,” Heinrichs said. “I have to coach, oversee and massage them. But I maintain fiduciary responsibility. I may give them a long leash, but I have to watch that they don’t spend too much money.”

Why is Heinrichs smitten by biotechnology?

“I think the driving force is the fascination of creating something, like an artist. That it’s for a good cause helps you. And that it may make money for you, that helps.

“But, for me, the fascination is to create something, like an artist.”