Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech

Hughes, a historian of science at Berkeley, wrote this from the oral history interviews she conducted with Genentech's founders, scientists and executives. It covers the period from Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen's recombinant DNA work in 1973 through the founding of Genentech by Boyer and the venture capitalist Robert Swanson in 1976, the synthesis of somatostatin and then human insulin, the 1980 public offering, and the early 1980s.

The substantive contribution is showing how a scientific technique became a company. Hughes documents the tension between academic norms of open publication and commercial requirements of patent priority and secrecy, and how Genentech resolved it by allowing publication after filing. She covers the Cohen-Boyer patent, which Stanford licensed non-exclusively and which earned enormous sums without blocking the field, and the decision to prove the technology by racing academic laboratories to synthesise a known human protein rather than by developing a novel drug. She also shows Swanson's role clearly: he supplied the conviction that the science was already commercial, several years before the scientists thought so.

The 1980 initial public offering, which occurred before Genentech had a product on the market, established the template for biotech financing that the industry still uses. Hughes is careful and archival, and the book is short. It ends in the early 1980s, so it does not cover the company's later development, the Roche acquisition, or the maturation of the industry. It is a scholarly monograph rather than a business narrative, and readers wanting management lessons will find the material thinner than the historical record.