Richard Scheller left his Stanford professorship for Genentech to learn how science becomes medicine. He talks about why he made the jump and what surprised him about drug development and business.
I was a professor here for 19 years. I was successful, a member of the National Academy, I was a Hughes investigator. So I had plenty of money, things were going well, but the research that I was doing had gone through a phase where the knowledge had just exploded over the last decade and the rate of learning started to sort of plateau a little bit. So I just took stock in where I was headed with the rest of my career and thought that I had to do one of a couple of things, find some new technology to increase that rate of learning again, or switch my field to a little bit, something different, where I felt was sort of prime for that tremendous gain of knowledge again, or maybe just do something different. So my wife, who's on the faculty here, and I thought, should we move to Boston? Go to Boston and have a bunch of nice colleagues there and then have labs there. But it really wouldn't be very different than here, given that we didn't have any problems here. We loved it here. So I thought if I was going to do something different and move somewhere, since being a professor here is terrific, that I should really move somewhere where it would be quite different. So I thought then, well, what would that be? It seemed to me then that we had done. And when I say we in this case, I mean the life science endeavor, not my lab. So everything funded by NIH for years and years had sort of done what we promised the society that we would do, which is learn enough about the way cells work and the way tissues work, enough about molecular biology so that we could actually think about disease in very, very mechanistic terms, which is the way I like to think. And wouldn't it be interesting to try and apply my biological insights to disease? So I was fortunate enough then to have somebody, David Botstein, who was in the genetics department at the time, had worked at Genentech. He kind of heard I was looking around at different things. He introduced me to the CEO of Genentech at the time, Art Levinson. And Art was a scientist, started off in the lab at Genentech, became the CEO. And I thought, wow, if I'm gonna actually have a boss, which was kind of a novel concept if you're a faculty member. If I'm going to have a boss, it should be someone who's a scientist who can actually understand logic and things like that, someone that I could talk to. So it seemed like a terrific challenge, a terrific opportunity, and that it would be really, really different from what I was doing day to day at Stanford. So I remember over the Christmas holiday 10 years ago, thinking, you know, should I do this? Should I do this? Walking into the lab and thinking, it's so nice here. My God, I have 10 years. Should I do this? What if they fire me? You know, I could get fired if I go there. You know, these were all kind of novel notions to think about, but it just seemed like a terrific opportunity and I took the plunge. And I have to say, for me personally, it was the right thing to do. My learning curve picked up again immediately, learning about all kinds of new science, about cancer biology. I didn't really know that. I knew about cell biology, but I didn't know specifically about cancer or immunology. I knew absolutely nothing about business. I was on the executive committee of the company. I had to find out what EPS stood for. So really the executive committee meetings were just learning all about business, all about drug development. How do you develop a drug? I'd never thought of that before. So it was just absolutely fascinating. I have to say I give the company a lot of credit because it basically, I think it's paid off for them. But it took me two years before I had any idea what I was even doing in business. I mean, I knew about science, but it really was a steep learning curve, but not something that happens, not something that happens overnight. So for me personally, I would say I took the leap because I wanted to do something different. And I felt it was the right time to become basically a human experimental biologist, which is what we do, all in the context of disease, of course.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
Depois de tantas histórias, aprendizados e pausas necessárias, o @interior_iza está de volta
