Genentech
The Beginnings of Biotech
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.
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.
Reviews
"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" – Daniel S. Greenberg, author of "Science for Sale" and "Tech Transfer: Science, Money, Love, and the Ivory Tower"
"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 weren't playing it safe, and they created a catalytic environment that generated a whole new industry" – Cynthia Robbins-Roth, author of "From Alchemy to IPO: The Business of Biotechnology"
"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" – Robert Cook-Deegan, Duke University
"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 Genentech's success but that pioneered the new biotechnology industry's operational model" – Daniel Kevles, Yale University
