From molecular biology to geology: a surprising trajectory.

Ithas been nearly 50 years since I started doingmolecular biology as a graduate student in the Department of Biophysics at The Johns Hopkins University. I am still doing molecular biology, but I now findmyself just as interested in geology; and although I will never really be a geologist, I have been on some fascinating field trips in the past eight years to South Africa, Namibia, Oman, Australia, the Bahamas, and the American West. I am even coauthor of a paper in geology (1), so I will reflect in this article how this came to pass. In 1965, when I left Johns Hopkins to begin my postdoctoral position in Cambridge, England, there were almost limitless possibilities ahead in biology: the final deciphering of the genetic code was in progress, and we thought we knew how genes were controlled. However, the eukaryotic world was largely unexplored, and at the molecular level, we knew nothing about embryology. Never entering my mind at the time was the possibility that I would enter the business arena in a serious way, and it is because I did become involved in business that I am now interested in geology. As I try to reconstruct the events that gave rise to my entry into business, the important elements involve not only what happened in biology that led to biotechnology but, in fact, what happened in the world at large, particularly in the chaotic period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I had a wonderful time in Cambridge. I learned genetics from Sydney Brenner and RNA sequencing from Fred Sanger and came home tomy first job at University of California, SanDiego (UCSD), in La Jolla with the plan of putting those two approaches together to solve important problems in gene regulation. However, in the fall of 1968, when I arrived at the UCSD campus in my tweed coat and rep tie, I was unprepared for what was going on. A demonstration was in progress. The regents and then-Governor Ronald Reaganweremeeting atUCSD, and the students were demonstrating in sympathy with the free speech movement going on in Berkeley. As the Vietnam War progressed and our students became increasingly vocal and active in opposition, most of my junior faculty peers and I were led to take part. Within two years, I had shedmy tweed coat, and my hair had grown to my shoulders. Of particular importance to this story was my involvement with a cadre of philosophy students at UCSD in the formation of a free school for our children. The philosophy department was the center of the revolution at UCSD: HerbertMarcuse was there, and one of his students was Angela Davis. Our school, Pepper Canyon, embraced every wacky and fascinating educational fad of the time, fromCarl Rogers encounter groups for the parents toMaoism for the students. (Wewere, of course, kicked off the UCSD campus after one year, but the school actually went on for four years, when the students themselves asked for its dissolution. As far as I can tell, none of them was irreparably harmed by the experience.) This seemingly irreversible diversion from the world of business actually led to the two most important elements of my involvement with it. First, it was at Pepper Canyon that I met Peter Johnson. Peter was a philosophy student and was one of the founders of the school. Peter was a THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY VOL. 284, NO. 52, pp. 35997–36006, December 25, 2009 © 2009 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.