Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise

Acknowledgments

A C k n o w l e d g m e n t s More than any other book I can imagine, this is the work of a lifetime in that I am drawing upon experiences since my teenage years, all specifically related to this work. I therefore owe debts to an unusually long series of people for enabling it. These include the biologists who took me into their laboratories and trained me in several fields, especially Michael Lew and fellow clinical microbiologists at the Dana-Farber, and Bruce Zetter and fellow angiogenesis researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston; Lucia Rothman-Denes and Peter Markiewicz and other prokaryotic molecular geneticists in the University of Chicago’s Biophysics department; and all the outstanding biologists—too many to name—that I studied with at Stanford. They also include Tom Furlong and my business professors and my drug industry friends, and the fine people I worked with briefly in marketing services at a certain biotech company. They include my recent teachers and colleagues in public health and pharmaco-epidemiology, especially Lisa Bero, Simon Chapman, Ben Djulbegovic, and Adriane Fugh-Berman, from whom I have come to appreciate evidence-based medicine (EBM) both as a research program and an ethical perspective. Some readers may not appreciate the occasional “activist” stance in this book stemming from this perspective . I make no apology for holding that sick people should only be sold drugs proven equal to existing therapies for their condition; and that when patients are given drugs on an experimental basis in clinical trials, the results of this human experimentation should be available to all of medicine—no matter who pays the bills. Like EBM, this book is proscience, not antibusiness. Of course I owe a great debt to a list of colleagues in history and philosophy of science too long even to begin, but one that particularly needs to include, for specific conversations that have informed this work over recent years, John Abraham , Mario Biagioli, Robert Bud, Bob Cook-Deegan, Ric Day, Jeremy Greene, Jim Griesemer, Paul Griffiths, Mary Hancock, Jon Harkness, Steve Hubicki, John viii Acknowledgments Krige, Toby Lazarowitz, Tim Lenoir, Harry Marks, Patrick McCray, Maureen O’Malley, Phil Mirowski, Peter Neushul, Scott Podolsky, Brad Sherman, Gabriela Soto-Laveaga, Karola Stotz, Bruno Strasser, and Peter Westwick. I also owe an enormous debt to all the scientists who took the time to interview with me: Julian Davies, Bruce Eisen, Ed Fritsch, Wally Gilbert, Alan Hall, Robert Kay, Glenn Larsen, Peter Lomedico, Tom Maniatis, Shige Nagata, Joseph Rosa, Peter Seeburg, John Shine, Daniel Vapnek, and Lydia Villa-Komaroff. I am very grateful to the Australian Research Council for funding the research, and to the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science for a sabbatical visit working on it. Finally, I must express my most grateful thanks to those who gave their time directly to this book: my partner, Jackie, for giving me space to write it, Andrea Gaede and Audra Wolfe for helping me research it and put it together, Cheri Cunningham for helping me realize the illustrations, Bill Summers and two anonymous referees for giving such constructive feedback on the manuscript, and Jackie Wehmueller for doing such a fine job in its publication. Gene Jockeys This page intentionally left blank ...