Biotech Valley, Boston?

BOSTON—Big science needs big money, and Harvard Medical School has plenty of both. Last year, over $185 million in research money poured into its sprawling laboratories in Boston and a dizzying number of scientific breakthroughs continue to pour out. Now, University President Lawrence H. Summers wants to capitalize on those breakthroughs by calling in the capitalists and using Harvard’s scientific might to foster a new Silicon Valley for the life sciences. The revolution in microchips will be followed by one in genes and proteins, Summers argues, and Harvard needs to be at the forefront.

Unfortunately, Summers is about twenty years too late. Biotechnology may be the “new frontier of industrial science,” as The Crimson wrote in 1982, but that frontier has consistently proven too rugged and unpredictable for most of its academic pioneers who hoped to turn the raw data of biology into marketable commodities and a fistful of stock options.

Twenty years ago, when most current undergraduates were still spitting up their mother’s milk (then still-uncontaminated by transgenic proteins) the relationship of the University to for-profit biotechnology companies was the subject of somber faculty meetings and cautious pronouncements by former University President Derek C. Bok. Although the relationship between the faculty and the biotech industry is less strained than it once was, the problems of actually building companies has not gone away—and those problems illustrate why Summers’ comparison to the electronics industry that grew up around Stanford University is not just unhelpful, but absurd.

When programmers fresh out of Stanford start a new software company, they know whether or not their ideas are theoretically possible. Because they know how a computer works, they do not waste time writing software that will malfunction. By contrast, a biotechnology company does exactly that. The myriad proteins that make up a living cell are still mostly mysterious to scientists. Thus, making chemicals that cause the cells to do one thing and not another is akin to writing a program for a computer about which you know very little. Drug discovery is like poker. You can give yourself the best odds, but you’re still probably going to lose.

This central problem with biotechnology (and more specifically, pharmaceuticals, where the payoffs are the biggest) has kept it a wild and unpredictable frontier. The journal Nature reported earlier this month that biotechnology stocks have collectively lost two-thirds of their value in the past two years. The University of California at San Francisco, which has forged close ties with the biotech industry in California, has seen collaborations with companies for research drop by nearly half from 2000. Such stark figures should give Summers pause before he starts intertwining Harvard research with the work of biotech companies. Indeed, Harvard has always been hesitant to associate itself too closely with for-profit companies. Cambridge-based Vertex Phamaceuticals, which includes former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy R. Knowles on its scientific advisory board, tried to name itself “Veritas” when it was founded in 1989. Knowles, however, interceded and convinced the company of the “sensitivity, the horror, the absolute unacceptability” of appropriating the University’s motto. (The story of Vertex and its charismatic CEO Joshua Boger, as told in Barry Werth’s book The Billion Dollar Molecule, illustrates the special problems of making money in the biotech world.) In many other universities, however, the wholesale commercialization of the life sciences has been “getting out of hand,” as Nature put it in an editorial earlier this month. But as Harvard scientists scramble for their next grant proposal, the last thing they want to worry about is how marketable future discoveries might be.

A further problem with making comparisons between the high technology and biotechnology is that the pace of discovery—and eventual profitability—is much slower than with easy-to-manufacture microchips. Products such as drugs take decades to pass through strict government reviews. Europeans refuse to eat genetically engineered food. Biotechnology is less of a Silicon Valley-style gold rush than a minefield where only the truly exceptional companies can turn a profit before they burn through all their capital.

But there is surely a place for companies in taking research and making it benefit people, isn’t there? At the posh Loeb House dinner held on the occasion of the dedication of the new Bauer Center for Genomics this March, Summers said “If ideas are to find expressions and cures to diseases, it is surely a major role for collaborations, closely defined, closely regulated; to be sure, collaborations with the private sector.” Summers has yet to clearly say what definitions and regulations he’s talking about, or how the Silicon Valley model applies to the vastly different world of life sciences. But as the public’s confidence in corporations continues to fall with the Dow, the dream of Biotech Valley, Boston seems more and more like a project Harvard should leave to MIT.

Jonathan H. Esensten ’04, a Crimson editor, is a biochemical sciences concentrator in Lowell House. In his lab at Harvard Medical School, he’s learning the joys of transient transfections and Western blots. The data look promising.