By Ron Leuty, Reporter - San Francisco Business Times
Think of technology, and images of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and a handful of others pop into your head.
Social media? Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Larry Page or Sergey Brin.
Environmentalism? Al Gore.
Biotech? (crickets) Biotech?
People in the biotech industry might point to former Genentech CEO Art Levinson or human genome researcher Craig Venter or others, but even those folks aren’t household names.
As one person tweeted to me recently: Who is the Steve Jobs of biotech? Who in biotech has a keen sense of value, a clear vision of the possibilities and — this might be most important — can personify the industry’s innovative streak in such a way that a drug launch grabs as much attention as the latest iteration of the iPhone?
Sure, an industry can survive without a modern icon. I can’t name a single car industry CEO off the top of my head — and I’m originally from Michigan — or from telecommunications or banking. But does biotech today really want to be associated with telecom (see our AT&T “dead zones” map) or banking?
This is not a new issue — Jim Wells of the University of California, San Francisco, formerly of Genentech and a founder of Sunesis Inc., talked to me three years ago about this problem. Still, no one has stepped forward.
Why? Scientists themselves are partly to blame for a deeply rooted research culture that can punish researchers with “out there” ideas (see: prions and Prusiner, Stan) and shower incremental (conservative?) advancements with National Institutes of Health grants.
“A lot of times, the NIH has trouble funding things that are high-risk, high-reward,” Brian Kennedy, president and CEO of the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, told me recently.
Kennedy should know; he has served on a grant-review committee and on an NIH study section.
Meanwhile, except for a federal stimulus program increase for the NIH, the agency’s budget has been essentially flat for years.
And where are the biotech executives? The ones in charge of small companies are busy trying to find money to keep their businesses alive; the ones with larger companies are focused on not making waves, for fear that Wall Street will smack them down.
In both cases, that has translated into silence.
It seems that no one is willing to put him- or herself on the line for the sake of explaining to Joe Sixpack just what it is they do and how that will benefit people with better drugs, devices or diagnostics. Is it really a Career Limiting Move?
Instead, the industry has largely allowed the money people with bottom-line motivations — the venture capitalists — to fight the fight. The industry’s “direct-to-consumer” messages, meanwhile, are saved for Cialis and Viagra ads.
So this is what we get: The ignoranti are leading efforts to remove fluoride from public water supplies, as the New York Times reported, and early-childhood vaccines are still touted by some as a cause of autism.
This dearth of science messengers reminds me of late 2008, when I was touring schools for my son. Our group stopped into a kindergarten class where the teacher was talking about the upcoming presidential election.
“Who’s this?” she said, pointing to a picture of Barack Obama opposite John McCain.
A few hands flew into the air.
“That’s Barack Obama,” one boy said. He paused and added with a sense of exasperation, “He’s everywhere.”
Obama’s seeming omnipresence landed him the presidency.
The biotech industry could learn a lesson by telling its story with relentless enthusiasm, like a politician on the campaign trail. If it doesn’t find its Steve Jobs in that respect, the industry and science overall risk losing longer-lasting battles than the fight for fluoridated water.
