Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes (review)

This book chronicles the early history of the biotech industry by focusing on the formation of Genentech, a small start-up company in California working in the field of recombinant DNA technology that eventually would, with remarkable success, connect basic scientific research to an enthusiastic Wall Street. However, Genentech did not always have the profile to command such attention, and Smith Hughes focuses on the particular years of Genentech’s story when the company had to struggle to define and prove itself. As Smith Hughes chronicles, the forces behind Genentech’s trailblazing success and failures interconnected in ways that would predict and help shape the upcoming biotech industry.

Smith Hughes has conducted an impressive array of oral history interviews with early players in and around Genentech, from its daring leadership to the brash scientists lured from academia into industry. The interviews bring insightful details to the story that might fade into obscurity otherwise. Some of these expand the story with human touches such as high-energy parties and pranks that the scientists threw themselves into. The book also tells first-person tales of dramatic races to achieve scientific breakthroughs, as well as descriptions of the cathartic rush when the company finally did scoop its rivals in a high-stakes project. In particular, Smith Hughes reveals Genentech’s cofounder Bob Swanson to be an unexpected visionary as he inspired and cajoled his small team of geniuses toward ambitious scientific goals. Though this story could have been told without reference to the human desire that drove Genentech and other ventures like it, much of the meat of the history would have been lost in that version of events. Instead Smith Hughes evokes for her reader the thrill of the disheveled, collaborative, ambitious start-up. In this way, she intuits the drama found in the story of a band of ragtag intellectuals working with fervor, facing challenges, and hitting the larger scene at just the right moment.

As Smith Hughes recounts, although Genentech may have looked humble and even shabby when it first began, its potential to bring new medical technology to the public was its continuously stated goal. The leadership at Genentech never doubted this potential and peddled it to venture capitalists, even as a skeptical public questioned the safety of products created by both nature and scientists. The road forward was fraught with steep challenges that no one had navigated before, and that waiting potential was tested in many ways. But indeed, as Smith Hughes shows, Genentech’s intrepid leaders were proved right, as the scientists broke new ground on more than one occasion to lay the framework for the genetic revolution. At the same time, entanglements and collaborations with academia proved to be uncomfortable waters to navigate, which, as noted, is a dynamic that still holds the possibility for tension today. In fact, Genentech’s experiences, both positive and negative, proved to be markers and models for how other companies would enter the burgeoning biotech market.

The interviews herein are also a significant source for gathering the information necessary to tell Genentech’s early story: they reveal information about the rhythms, successes, and even missteps of the company before its name was making regular headlines. These interviews are woven together with documents and news articles, the latter being of increasing frequency as Genentech’s reputation began to grow but not in its early years.

In mixing together the elements of interviews and other pertinent materials, Hughes has taken into account the business, the science, and the humanity of how Genentech was formed, as well as how it grew. Although the book would be most relevant to an audience interested in the history of science, the oral histories are skillfully intermixed with the other materials in a smoothly told narrative. The book ends just when Genentech becomes a Wall Street darling, leaving the reader with the possibility of more exploration into this subject as Genentech stock quite suddenly became highly desired and...