Biomed Tycoon, 74, Innovates at a Young Man’s Pace
Alfred E. Mann can steady the beat of a faltering heart and breathe sound into a damaged ear. His eyes dance at the mere mention of an artificial pancreas.
This biomed billionaire, still working 80-hour weeks at age 74, prefers to keep a relatively low profile in the San Fernando Valley, where five of his eight companies are based.
But Mann--whose $5.7-billion insulin-pump firm, MiniMed Inc., just moved into sleek new digs at Cal State Northridge--recently stumbled into a bureaucratic bog.
In his latest attempt to expand a Valley-based business, he tripped over delays and then Los Angeles City Councilman Alex Padilla’s reluctance to let him build a facility for cancer-busting rather than deafness-healing on surplus city land in Sylmar. Padilla has tabled the proposal for further study.
Mann still hopes to cut a deal, but he is much more likely to cry over a 4-year-old girl, once deaf but now hearing thanks to an implant from one of his companies, than over some development squabble.
“We’re curing the deaf,” he says. “We’re trying to cure the blind. We’re trying to cure cancer. . . . I would rather devote my time and energies to solving problems for mankind than dealing with the bureaucracies of the city.”
He’s one of the country’s richest men, worth an estimated $1.6 billion, perfectly positioned to retire and enjoy the fruits of his labors--except that the only fruits he seems to really savor are his labors.
This is a guy who didn’t take a vacation for 10 years as he built MiniMed. A physicist who started his first company, defense contractor Spectrolab Inc., at the age of 30. A businessman so determined to wrench productivity out of every minute that he schedules meetings for even the fleeting moments he spends at airports during layovers.
“I’m not sure I have a balanced life at all, even today,” Mann says cheerfully. “My problem is, the work I do is so fulfilling. I don’t need to work anymore. I’m giving my money away. But what I do at work is really play.”
A native of Portland, Ore., Mann is the middle child of immigrant parents, an English father who ran a grocery store and a Polish mother who adored music. His older brother, Robert, is renowned as the founding violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet. His sister, Rosalind Koff, is a concert pianist.
Over the past 30 years, Mann has built a medical technology empire by churning out small, clever devices that shore up failing parts of the human body. Pacesetter Inc., a company he founded in the late 1960s and later sold for $150 million, became the leading supplier of heart pacemakers.
MiniMed made a fortune building tiny insulin pumps for diabetics and is now developing an artificial pancreas to monitor glucose levels and deliver insulin.
From MiniMed, Mann created Advanced Bionics Corp., which makes implants to treat deafness. Another company, CTL Immunotherapies, works on a cancer vaccine.
“He’s got a true passion for producing the kinds of things that will help society,” said Lee Kanon Alpert, a Northridge attorney who led the CSUN advisory board when the MiniMed headquarters was being built. “He has been rewarded financially, but I think more than that, his reward has been helping people.”
Thrice-divorced and the father of six grown children, Mann is busily giving money away these days, becoming one of the largest-ever benefactors of universities. In 1998, he announced gifts totaling $200 million to fund biomedical research at USC and UCLA, and another endowment is in the works for Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Chairman of the Southern California Biomedical Council, Mann fondly advises young entrepreneurs: “Capital is king. Don’t ever forget that.”
But he clearly values his employees--more than 2,400 of whom work in the San Fernando Valley--and has fostered workplaces noted for their creative freedom.
“He’s very smart, and he’s extremely positive. I think those two attributes rub off on people who work for him,” said Keay Nakae, a research analyst who tracks MiniMed at Wedbush Morgan Securities and once worked under Mann as an engineer at Pacesetter.
“He likes to hire good, smart people and turn them loose. When I first [came to Pacesetter], someone told me: ‘We don’t care how you dress or whether your hair is long. If you’re smart and creative, we’re glad to have you.’ ”
Don’t bother asking Mann about hobbies. (“I used to play tennis, but I don’t anymore. I work night and day.”) But he allows himself some fun outside the biomed bubble, in the form of his high-tech mansion hidden in the mountains off Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills.
Dubbed Mann Mall by his employees, the sprawling glass-and-steel edifice features an indoor pool with a flowing current, a water slide, a koi pond that meanders through the house, and an extensive Asian art collection.
It has about 30 rooms--Mann’s not sure exactly how many, but the air-conditioning system has 22 zones--and several apartments to house his staff of eight.
He enjoys dining out with friends or digging into a zesty meal of Santa Barbara shrimp prepared by his personal chef. And he has “a lovely lady friend,” Claude Jirault, with whom he has, in recent years, broken his self-imposed blackout on vacations.
They have visited Cabo San Lucas several times, and once they ventured off on an 11-day cruise.
“He thought that was much too long,” said Georgia Smith, his secretary for nearly 18 years. “He couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t get to a phone as often as he wanted to call the office.”
