In the 1980s, the idea of serious academic scientists founding biotechnology companies struck many researchers as strange, and even suspicious. There was a lot of fear that scientists were doing something vaguely unprofessional, even problematic. CSHL scientist and Protein Databases Inc. co-founder Bob Franza remembers that “in those days, people could use affiliation with a company for an argument as a conflict of interest.” The fact that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory had ties to commercial biotech companies in the 1990s, for example, was used as an argument against its president at the time becoming the head of the Human Genome Project. Commercialization, for some, tainted academic scientists and called their motives into question.
