Gene dreams : Wall Street, academia, and the rise of biotechnology / Robert Teitelman.

  • Teitelman, Robert.
Date:
[1989], ©1989
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Gene dreams : Wall Street, academia, and the rise of biotechnology / Robert Teitelman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Notes of humanity. With the development of human genetic engineering, a tool even more awesome is now available {Who Should Play God? [New York: Dell, 1977], p. 9). 10. See Jesse Treu, Biotechnology Seems to Follow Semiconductor's Route as It Looks Beyond 'One-for-One' Products, Medical Business Journal, July 31, 1988, p. 218. Treu offers a more sophisticated, three-stage model of the semiconductor analogy which takes into account the fact that early biotech offerings like human insulin and t-PA seem to be more commodity than value-added products. Indeed, Treu dismisses the first gen¬ eration of companies and turns his attention to the next. I offered a counterargument in a two-part essay in Oncology Times, Oct. 1988 and Nov. 1988. 11. See Robert Johnston and Christopher G. Edwards, Entreprenuñal Science: New Links Between Corporations, Government and Science (New York: Quorum Books, 1987) for one of the balder statements of this view. The authors argue not only that techno¬ logical startups will save the country—Expect that high technology will be America's economic panacea (p. 2)—but that the government should help them along in anv way it can. They also make an argument exactly contrary to Harry Rubin about the maturity of the technology. One important characteristic of biotechnology is the very short lead time from discovery to application. A laboratory finding can, in many cases, lead to a path of product development almost immediately after the finding is published (p. 7). This view seems overly optimistic. Robert Johnston, by the way, is the same venture capitalist behind Cytogen and Genex. 12. The transistor flowed firom communications technology, hence its link to Bell Laboratories. Emest Braun and Stuart MacDonald, in their study Revolution in Minia¬ ture: The History and Impact of the Semiconductor Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) go back to Michael Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic in¬ duction in 1833 as the genesis of microelectronics. The figures on transistors come from them as well (pp. 54-55). 13. See Science, March 18, 1988, p. 1364, and March 25, 1988, p. 1979, for a compre¬ hensive examination of the problems at NIH. Chapter 21 1. Stephen Carter, interview with author, April 14, 1988. All further quotations from Carter in this chapter are from this interview. 2. Carter was, if anything, even more emphatic about cytotoxics at an analysts' meeting held the month before, in March 1988: Why do we continue our activities in cytotoxic chemotherapy? . . . First, it's a mainstay of our cancer business. Second, and perhaps most important, no biological therapy currently in clinical trial has demonstrated a major impact on the survival of cancer patients. It is clear that biological therapy today, at least those discoveries that are in the clinic, do not threaten the use of chemotherapy. If anything, the proponents of biologic therapy are moving toward the concept of combin¬ ing the two approaches. The third reason is that we feel cytotoxic chemotherapy is most likely to be an important modality into the early twenty-first century. 3. An insight into Todaro's views comes from that same March 1988 analysts' meeting: The last one and a half years as part of Bristol-Myers have been exciting because we've been able to concentrate on new discoveries and on bringing them forward. We have maintained a high level of scientific competence and, except for today, have not had to concern ourselves with financial analysts. If you knew the previous two or three years at Genetic Systems, that's quite a change—and a beneficial one. 4. Ironically, the word revolution originally came into use in the physical sciences. As Harvard historian I. Bernard Cohen points out in his study Revolution in Science (Cam¬ bridge: Belknap, 1985), the term was first used to denote a physical rearrangement of the universe, as in De Revolutionibus by Copernicus in 1543. With the coming of the En¬ lightenment, the term became synonymous with massive political and social change, particularly the French Revolution, before seeping back into the sciences in the nine- 229