SPEAKER_04

So I had developed a way, this will sound scary, but I developed a way to use retroviruses and make libraries of retroviruses to reverse the process of evolution in a way that rather than viruses hurting the cell, I set it up so that viruses would help the cell.

And once they helped the cell, I would figure out what they did.

And so we sold hundreds of millions of dollars of targets that way using retroviral libraries to basically find targets and use some of the benefits of viruses but to our advantage.

Well, I had developed in David's lab, along with this guy, Warren Pear, a means.

It's called the 293T retroviral producer system.

It was a way to make large numbers of these viruses very quickly.

It really followed on the work of this guy, Richard Mulligan, who'd also been a postdoc with David Baltimore, who developed what was called the 3T3-based retroviral production system.

And he developed it in Paul Berg's lab at Stanford.

So there's a lot of sort of, you know, interbreeding here.

But the problem with that was it took three months.

So I had brought with me a cell line called 293T that I introduced to the lab and said, hey, maybe we could use this to make viruses quickly.

I won't go into the details of why, but we could do it in three days rather than three months.

And so that now, I mean, tens of thousands of labs use that worldwide.

It probably generates the most money for me every year over any of my other inventions just because Stanford, rather than patenting it, licenses it.

And licenses are forever, whereas patents have a 17-year lifespan.

So Stanford made a good choice there.

But then people, I mean, they eventually learned.

I wouldn't say that it's the way that people think anymore.

But there's still a little bit of a... I mean, you shouldn't walk into the lab thinking I'm here to make money.

Yeah.