SPEAKER_04

And Stanford wanted to be an enable within the medical school, both the basic research, which we were great at,

as well as bringing it directly to the patients as well.

So to link clinicians and the desires of clinicians with the basic researchers.

I mean, most scientists would be happy just to study anything.

You know, just point me at something and I'll be happy if I can get interested in it.

So, and we're no more happy than when somebody recognizes the value of what we do.

But basic research was sort of the height, and there was a push against anybody trying to commercialize.

So when I started as an assistant professor, so I started as a grad student.

I went to MIT to work with this guy, David Baltimore, who won the Nobel for reverse transcriptase research.

And then I wanted to come straight back to Stanford because I already felt that it was a positive environment for commercialization.

My former boss's mentors, Len and Lee Herzberg, had two of the biggest patents at Stanford.

They had the fluorescence-activated cell sorter and then what are called humanized antibodies, which brought in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to Stanford.

And actually, they gave personally most of their own money away.

They kept enough to survive, but then they gave most of the money away and they ran their own lab off of a lot of that money.

So I had learned from them about how to still do basic research but commercialize on the side.

And so I wanted to bring that back, but the department that I came into, the Department of Pharmacology at the time,

I was warned by many professors, don't commercialize that.

And I ignored them and I went and started a company that went public on NASDAQ.

And many of those same professors came back to me years later and sitting in my office asking me how to start a company.

It just was instinctual because I couldn't see the NIH funding what I wanted to do.