One of the things that several people involved in building the biotech industry on Long Island in the 1980s mention is the excitement of doing something new and unprecedented. The industry itself was new and no one knew what form it might eventually take, here or elsewhere. Ginny Llobell, who was assistant director of the Stony Brook Center for Biotechnology in the late 1980s remembers that “it was a big deal to create something from what I think was almost vaporware. It was a nascent idea that had to be put into practice. It had to be made real.”
