It’s easy to imagine what might motivate an investigator to start a company. Getting a technology into the hands of people who could use it, developing a drug to treat a disease, or simply wanting to make a few bucks. But what motivates people to get out of the biotech industry? Bob Franza, CSHL scientist and co-founder of Protein Databases Inc., talks about when he stepped back from PDI, soon after a dispute related to the directorship of the Human Genome Project in which a few participants claimed that biotech consultancies and stock ownership in biotech companies were incompatible with disinterested science. He found the dispute frustrating and silly. More than that, it was a distraction from actually getting good science done.
Bob Franza, interviewed via Zoom on June 23, 2023
Interviewer: Antoinette Sutto
Bob: “Here we are. We’ve got this thing [PDI] going. I’m doing my science. I’m publishing things like Nature and Cell and Science, and I couldn’t care less about all of it. One day I get informed that an investigator from the government, I guess this guy was with the Department of Justice or something. I don’t know what the heck. He was going to come and interview Jim Garrels and I about our ownership of stock and our consulting agreements as all part of this scheme against Jim [Watson, who was then the director of CSHL]. I was like– This will just give you an indication of what my priorities were. I just went to Jim Garrels and said, “I’m not going to get caught up in this nonsense.” I said, “I’m just going to give my stock to the lab [CSHL] and halt my consulting agreement, and I’ll have nothing to do with PDI again.” Because I was way the hell more interested in Fos-Jun interactions than I was with any of this nonsense. Right about that time, I guess Steve Blose had become CEO of PDI, and I handed over my stock to [CSHL administrator] Morgan Brown and stopped my consulting agreement.
That was the end of it. That was the reward of going through, walking across the lawn between Blackford and McClintock [two buildings at CSHL], and having people point at you and go, “Oh, yes. That’s the guy that’s starting a company,” and all kinds of really nasty stuff.
Antoinette: A scarlet C on you for commercialization.
Bob: Yes, exactly. The reality was it was all pretty silly. It will always remain — it’s just kind of silly. The thing that was the most disappointing was just the energy and the time that it took to do this. It was not easy raising money to start an analytics company by any stretch of the imagination. That first million and the subsequent chunks of money that came in and then it ended up becoming a penny stock. It was a lot of effort. The lab got the stock. I have absolutely no idea with how much money they got when Steve did the deal. I imagine they got something. I’ve never known. I couldn’t care less.”