Big Boost for Biotechnology

In the 1960s, well before anyone had heard of the term “defense conversions,” physicist Alfred E. Mann began applying some of the money and expertise he had gained in the aerospace industry to the emerging field of biomedicine. Mann went on to make hundreds of millions of dollars inventing medical devices like pacemakers for heart patients and insulin pumps for diabetics. In the process he helped build a biomedical industry in Southern California that would help drive the region’s economy when the aerospace industry sputtered.

Now, with his announcement Wednesday that he will donate $100 million to USC and another $100 million to UCLA to establish biomedical research and development centers, Mann has helped prepare the regional economy for another transition, this one within the biomedical industry itself. Whereas the Los Angeles entrepreneur gained his fortune through biomedical inventions made of metal and plastic, biomedical inventions of the future will be crafted mostly from DNA, the once-secret code that nature uses to tell human, animal and plant cells what to do.

In the mid-1990s, scientists made huge strides in unraveling DNA’s codes, learning not only how to read them but how to change them so, for example, a pig’s pancreas would produce human insulin and a plant cell would produce natural pesticide. But while exciting, DNA research is also expensive: Even unraveling the simple genome of the humble nematode worm took years of research by scientists who went down many blind alleys before reaching useful scientific paths.

In the last decade, many investors poured the lion’s share of their venture capital into Southern California biomedical research centers, enabling UC San Diego to expand its biomedical engineering, UC Irvine to increase research into neurobiology, the Claremont Colleges to launch a new biomedical college and Caltech to start up 17 biomedical companies since 1996.

Some academics fear that contributions from business-savvy scientists like Mann will compromise academic freedom, leading scientists to undertake only the kind of research that makes money. To be sure, Mann’s donation will bring more market incentives to USC. At the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering, university officials will receive 30% of royalties from any product that makes it to market--after initial costs to secure the patent and a cut for the inventor. With biomedicine, good science and good economics are largely one in the same. What makes money is what helps people. Mann’s gift will help do that.