Interview: George Rathmann
Founding Chairman, Amgen

You had a significant career at other companies -- especially 3M -- before you started your own. How did you come to leave 3M and go off on your own?

George Rathmann: I actually went to go with Litton Industries. And what had happened was that while I was at 3M, they became excited about a lot of different parts of 3M. I had a problem holding a job at 3M. I never was in the same job for more than three years, and then there would be somebody that would say, "Why don't you try this?" and I'd do that. And that was part of 3M too. It was very dynamic.

At 3M things changed there about every three years. It started out in polymers, and that's elastomers and rubbers and plastics, and then I went to physical chemistry, including acoustics and other things. And then it went to health care and tapes, and then it went to photographic products. And along the way I had several years on a rocket propellant program, because about that time Sputnik had gone up, in 1958, and the head of the company, Mr. McKnight, was concerned about the fact that we better make our contribution to the national good and help with a propellant program. And so all of those things evolved. The last one was the photographic area. I decided to leave the science role completely and start to go toward a business direction and try to bring an x-ray film that we'd invented into the marketplace, which we did. And the company we worked with was Litton. So I went to Litton as the President of a division that marketed the x-ray film for 3M. Then I left Litton to go to Abbott Laboratories. That's when I went to Abbott. And after these 30 years of those various big business experiences, when I had a chance to start Amgen, it was just one of those things. I was fascinated by the science, and it could be a very dangerous call, I suppose, to let fascination decide your career path. But I never regretted it, and it turned out. I believe that's a good principle anyway. If you really like something, you ought to do it. So I started at Amgen, leaving Abbott Laboratories at that time. That was after 30 years.

That was after 30 years of work experience in a big company. Suddenly taking on the thought that maybe I could do something in a small company. It was small all right. I was the first employee. That's about as small as you can get.

Things have changed since then. How big is Amgen now?

George Rathmann: I would probably misstate it, but it's certainly 6,000 people, plus or minus a thousand.

Back to Abbott, what are you most proud of having accomplished there, and how long were you there?

George Rathmann: I was there five years, and as always, there were some wonderful, wonderful people there, which is a good part of a happy career. Two or three individuals that had started the diagnostic effort decided they needed someone who could head the scientific part of the diagnostic effort. So I was in charge of R&D, and became Vice President of R&D. I was proud of several aspects of what I did. I think I was a factor in having them recognize that the true potential of diagnostics were far beyond the several products that they had discovered early and were concentrating on. Also, the true potential was even more important than just taking the next step, incremental improvements in those products. It was just, "The sky's the limit. This is going to be a diagnostic age."

What were the products?

George Rathmann: The product that they first started with was a hepatitis diagnostic, which was a wonderful product, and a small device for doing certain kinds of chemistries. And what happened after that was we came out with cancer products, and other types of diagnostics across the spectrum of anything and everything you could do diagnostically: for spina bifida, diagnostics for various types of cardiovascular problems, a whole spectrum of infectious disease diagnostics, including additional hepatitis diagnostics. And it was just a matter of a very, very talented bunch of people that were now unleashed, so to speak. Instead of being restricted, and kind of the idea that "You better stay with the thing you know the best," the sky's the limit. "Let's try and be the biggest diagnostic company in the world." And of course they are today. There was a period of -- I was only there five years, but the transformation was wonderful. I was given the opportunity, and the company decided it wanted to have a very strong diagnostic effort, and we became the fair-haired boys of the company. The Chairman, I remember, just used to think we were the delightful people in the company. We were called Abbott Diagnostics Division, which is ADD, and he prided himself, when he described us, as the people in the "After Dark Division," because, as my boss said, all the people there were just the hardest working people the world has ever known. We did burn the midnight oil. And that's hard to do, hard to maintain that in a large company. You have to have great leadership, and a couple of people there were remarkable leaders, and I was the beneficiary of that.

That must have been a difficult decision, whether to stay at Abbott, or start this new enterprise, Amgen.

George Rathmann: When you have two good alternatives, you don't sweat it too badly. That's a lot better than the really tough decision between two terrible alternatives. So that was the point that -- the company did offer to start a recombinant DNA program for me to keep me there, because they saw I was fascinated by recombinant DNA. And I thought it was a brilliant call to say, "We'll set up a company. And no, you don't have to follow all the rules and regulations of Abbott. You don't have to be inhibited by a lot of bureaucracy, because we know these young companies are going to have to be dynamic. You can make it as dynamic as you want. You need outside investors? You can have outside investors. You want to go public? You can even take it public. All that we'd like is we maintain 52 percent ownership of your company, and that's a reasonable request." And I thought it was very reasonable. I accepted the job. So I didn't go off to this company, Amgen, that was about to form. I said, "I'll stay," but after about three days, I decided it really wasn't going to work, because the 52-percent ownership would inhibit people from believing that we had "the sky's limit." And although Abbott was a wonderful company, I just thought it would be better to start fresh with a brand new company. I knew I was going to be competing with Genentech and Cetus and other biotech companies that had started, and they were run that way. They were independent companies, and they were very dynamic. So we started Amgen as a dynamic company in the same mold, and had the benefit that these other companies kind of showed us how to do it.

I didn't know much about recombinant DNA. I was certainly in the dark. I just liked the thrill of the thought that you could actually make human proteins. Now, for the first time, you could create them. They could be safely made, and made commercially interesting. So although there weren't very many examples of that, it was clear that's where the science was going. And of course, the other part of the science was that you'd actually have a basis of looking at and having a true molecular understanding of the human being, instead of, as biology had been up 'til that time, "There's a factor one and a factor two and a factor three," all the way up to factor eight in the coagulation family. And not a single one of those chemicals could have been identified by the people who had named them. By the time recombinant DNA came along, you could pinpoint the exact chemical structures of every one of those things. And every other molecule in the body was available for that decoding, and that's exactly what made it exciting. So I wanted to do it, and I decided I'd better do it with an independent company. So it was a fairly tough call, but what made it easy was that after I worried about it for a while, I finally decided to do it on a friendly basis. Came back to Abbott and got a $5 million investment from Abbott to help us get started. And $5 million from Abbott, that was the ticket to success, because immediately the venture capitalists all lined up. And we raised $19 million because they said, "If that tightfisted, conservative organization in the Midwest put in $5 million, that must be a great start." So we raised a lot of money. And that made the difference. That made Amgen successful enough to pass up all the previous companies that were already out there.

Sounds like you were quite a salesman, too.

George Rathmann: Well, that's been said, but I don't really think so. There was a certain amount of selling that went on. My dad was a salesman, but he had more charm than I did.

The technique that I learned to use was data. What I could do in going back to Abbott was I knew the company by that time, I'd had five years there, so I had analyzed the company and said, "Here's where recombinant DNA might work. It might work in your pharmaceutical division. It might work in the diagnostic division. It might help you in Ross Labs and some additions to Similac. It might help you in your chemical program. We could do something with subtilisin and possibly have a diet pill improvement, or possibly do it by recombinant DNA." Most of the things I talked about have come to pass, but Amgen's relationship with Abbott was actually limited to a diagnostic one. We didn't do a lot of the other things. But I was pretty effective because I was full of knowledge, and the power of the science was not -- they didn't miss that -- that we could have impacted every one of those fields. And eventually recombinant DNA did, by the way.

It's obvious that your science background has hugely enhanced your business life.

George Rathmann: One thing that always struck me was that when I was dealing with businesspeople, they were always impressed I was one of the best scientists they knew. And when I was dealing with scientists, they were always impressed I was one of the best business persons they knew. I never quite got the stamp of approval from the businessmen that I was a businessman. I never quite got the stamp of approval from the scientists that I was a scientist. But, as you say, they kind of worked together, and it worked out all right.

You subsequently left Amgen, but looking back on very rich years, it's hard to think of a company that took better advantage of being in the right place at the right time, in the development of science, in this case biotechnology.

George Rathmann: Well, we weren't quite so wise as it sounds. The people had demonstrated the moment to us, in a sense. Genentech had been formed in 1976, and this was 1980.

We had a pretty good role model in Genentech, and as it unfolded, they were even better. So that the month I started at Amgen, Genentech went public. That told us something. They had the courage to go public with a company that was not making money, that had no products, no sales, and that was almost a first in its own right. But it meant to us, "Well, when we need it, we'll be able to raise money and go public, " and on and on. Genentech had really been the visionary company that said, "This is the moment in time." Of course, sometimes being second, you actually get some benefits of not having to be the guy that breaks all the ice, and you can follow the better -- maybe more attractive -- pathway. So it took about five or six years, and then Amgen really outstripped Genentech. But it was certainly not without the guidance that Genentech provided, and us getting going in the right channels. We would never have gone into the pharmaceutical thing, for example, if it hadn't been that Genentech showed it was feasible. We had some programs, but they weren't very successful at first. And it was discouraging, and you thought about the huge cost of the FDA. And you just thought, ""Can you really do this?" And Genentech said, "Yeah, we can do it. We're going to be the next pharmaceutical company." So I said to our Board, "We can do it. We can be the next pharmaceutical company," and two of the pharmaceutical people on my Board just about killed me on the spot. "You'll never be a pharmaceutical company. You can't do that from being -- a biotech company should never try to be a pharmaceutical company. Bring your products to the pharmaceutical industry and that will be the way to exploit them. Don't try and do it yourself." "Well, let's watch Genentech. They're doing pretty well." "I don't think Genentech is a reasonable company as a model for this company. We don't want to use Genentech." Mm, maybe. But we did, and we learned a lot, and they did show us the right way.

You said there were some things that didn't work out. Could you tell us about some of those setbacks, and how you reacted to them?

George Rathmann: Yes. Well, I was surprised. Someone asked me that today. "How did you keep going when you had so many reversals? You had eight products that weren't successful."

The stock went from $18 a share, with a lot of enthusiasm, to $12 a share, with somewhat less enthusiasm, to $9 a share, to $6 a share, to $3.75. That's a big burden to have to carry, because you have investors that are very disturbed, and you have, supposedly, employees that are disenchanted. Except it never happened. The people at Amgen always felt that we were on the right track, we were going to do great things. They had great science. They liked each other. They knew they were brilliant. We had a brilliant scientific board, and we knew that we had the right ammunition to win the war. But there were times that it took a lot of that kind of enthusiasm -- and might have seemed to some people misguided enthusiasm -- and that's what sustained the effort. We were sort of even prepared to change direction. We weren't locked in by any rules of the company that we couldn't go this way, you have to go that way. That happens today a lot more. Even the successful biotech companies will tell you that, well, they can't go into that field because their franchises are over here. And I always worry about that. I think I like the uninhibited approach. It's dangerous. You can spend too much money, you can scatter your shots. But boy, it's hard to predict ahead of time where the answers that are really going to pay off are. So we had the good fortune that we could change direction with ease. And the board that we had was visionary enough to say, "Well, if that's what you fellows want to do, then we'll support that." So we went in and out of fields, and we went back into the pharmaceutical thing, even though the first pharmaceuticals we tried to work with hadn't been very successful. And then huge advances were made by some really wonderful scientists in the company, and they set the stage. It's basically -- it's all science. The era that Amgen was in -- and I think Genentech started it -- it's all science. You think business is it. Well, without the science, you've got absolutely nothing. And the science that you have is closely linked to academic science. So there's a huge transition to make it a business proposition, but you still have to have really some of the best scientists that are around in that field at that time.

When did you realize that these products wouldn't work out?

George Rathmann: We thought we had successes in those eight products. The success of finding that you can make chicken growth hormone, I'll tell you, it made Genentech very envious. We were the first to have chicken growth hormone. There are nine billion chickens in the world, four billion chickens in the United States. This was going to be a great thing. It just happened that it didn't do anything to the growth of chickens. The prediction was that it would enhance their growth, they'd grow more efficiently. They might even grow bigger. We talked about chickens as big as turkeys, and they never got any bigger than chickens. They weren't any cheaper, and they didn't get there any faster. So that was one of those. It was a great success that we got the gene and it functioned as a growth hormone. It just didn't affect the commercial end of the chicken market -- broiler market as it was called. And then we had indigo. We made indigo, and brilliant science work, and made indigo in bacterial cells, E-coli, common bacteria, and we were able to make indigo blue dye. It was a hundred million-dollar business. We thought we'd certainly get a piece of that. But we couldn't dislodge the existing ways of making the drug, even though it involved toxic chemicals and so on. Environmentally, the Amgen approach was far superior. But the overall economics weren't there. So that was a disappointment.

Interferon, as I mentioned today. The Holy Grail, we thought. If you have an interferon, you're going to have the cure for everything. Well, it didn't work. As far as we could tell, it didn't work. The interferon we had just didn't do anything particularly useful. But we just kept looking around and looking around, and the first big success was a program we had started at the very beginning of the company. So it wasn't redirected, it was just that we were now spending more time on the pharmaceutical side. And this was erythropoietin -- EPO, as it's called. Everybody knew since 1907 that there was a molecule that would cause red cells to form, that it existed probably in the bloodstream. In 1947, 40 years later, it was discovered that it was actually produced in the kidney. And 20 years after that, somebody was able to isolate a small amount from a patient that was actually spilling over into their urine, because they were aplastic anemic patients, and that would cause a very high level of erythropoietin, so you got some isolated material. So all that process taking years and years and years, and when we picked up the ball, it was to take that first smidgen of EPO and see what we could do. And a Taiwanese scientist just worked night and day, and I mean night and day. And he was working in the face of people saying, "Fu-Kuen Lin..." which was his name, "...there isn't really much hope you're going to find this." Genentech couldn't find it. Biogen couldn't find it. A half a dozen other biotech companies had looked like they'd tried to find it, but they can't find the gene. But there has to be a gene. I mean, you know there has to be a gene. The fact that you can't find it is almost a paralyzing experience, but you know it has to be there.

We now know a lot why we missed it. It's expressed at very, very, very low levels. The benefit of that turned out to be apparent once we had the gene and the protein.

If you give a patient erythropoietin for the rest of his life -- a patient that has no kidneys will be totally anemic -- you can restore them to normal red blood cell levels with erythropoietin, or EPO as we called it. Aad if you gave it to that patient for the rest of his life, he would consume one aspirin tablet -- 500 milligrams -- of erythropoietin over his whole life span. It was that potent. It's that rare. It's that rare in the body. And it's for that reason that it was very hard to find it. So it was just a heroic effort to do it, and once it was done, it was one of the great success stories, because everything clicked into place. How would you make the molecule stable? It was intrinsically very, very stable. What were the yields when you tried to make it? The yields got better and better right away. How hard was it to purify? We had absolutely pristine purity very quickly. And it was just like you were charmed. After all these many years -- and it took us four years and we didn't have anything -- and suddenly we had this. It was heaven on earth. It was a very exciting time.

Some of the scientists there helped inspire some of the other scientists to look for things like erythropoietin, and one of them was working with Sloane-Kettering and discovered a molecule that they thought produced white cells. They actually thought it was a basic molecule that produced more what was called the basic stem cell, or the basic cell in the white cell family, or in the whole hematopoietic family. I was trying to avoid the word, but I couldn't. Anyway, so there was a thought that this was going to be a very potent molecule. And of course, it turned out to be potent, but it was not the molecule they thought it was. It did not do all the things they had hoped. It did only one thing: it made neutrophils. It turns out, with cancer patients, the one thing they need more than anything else is a chemical that will make neutrophils. So we had found the Holy Grail in a funny way, and it was really the Holy Grail. That compound, when it was introduced and was approved by the FDA, had enormous pick-up right off the bat. I don't know how many patients -- I'd rather talk patients than dollars -- but it sold $50 million worth of Neupogen the first week. One week's sales, $50 million. It was a miraculous drug, and it was curing people from day one. Really a very important drug. It made it possible to have chemotherapy without inducing such a compromise that the patients got sick from infections. So the chemotherapy -- one of the offsets of chemotherapy is that it runs your white cell levels down and then you get infections. So these were two marvelous, marvelous drugs.

Surprisingly, it's been hard to find another one anywhere near as good as those. And the amount of money spent since then has been vast compared to that. But at the same time, the company had to redirect its thinking to making sure they exploited the benefits of these molecules, and how to extend them into slightly different versions, that would last longer and do things that the initial molecules didn't do. So that improvement cycle has been very well conducted. But the discovery of equally interesting molecules has not been there.

Do you remember how you first became interested in science?

George Rathmann: I couldn't go quite back to day one, but it was pretty early. And it partly was influenced by others...

I can remember at the ages of 8, 9 and 10, my brother going into science. He was quite a bit older than I was. My brother-in-law being in medical research at Lilly, things like that. But I was actually, about that time, I was also reading medical books and the popular type of books, Paul de Kruif and Microbe Hunters and things like that, Pasteur and Ehrlich, and that was a huge stimulus to think about medical research. I never stopped thinking about it. I got myself into more physics and chemistry along the way. Some of the excitement there was learning how to create explosive reactions whenever you wanted to, in a way that you were pretty sure wasn't going to hurt you. Fortunately I never was even close to being injured. In high school and those days, those adventures sometimes were rather painful, when people got semi-disabled with fingers and other things. So it's not a very good role model for people. But getting your hands on early chemicals and physical experiments is a really stimulating part, experiencing it yourself. So there's a whole combination of things that involve role models, and people would give you stimulus by their objections. My brother-in-law, in my case, would set up little experiments so he could build some kind of a projector with a few little objects, and all of a sudden you were really creating something. That's very exciting, and if you happen to be susceptible to this, as I was, it leaves an imprint that never goes away. So I was probably fascinated from maybe an 8-year-old age right on up.

Did you have a chemistry set?

George Rathmann: I had a chemistry set. It never worked all that well for me. Stuff would dry out and wouldn't seem to be very good. So I did better with standard materials. I did a lot better when I got to high school and could borrow from the school, things like zinc and hydrochloric acid so you could make hydrogen. Then you can blow up hydrogen. Then you learn how to do electrolysis, and then you can make hydrogen and oxygen. Then you can blow up hydrogen and oxygen. I did a lot better then, although I did have a chemistry set and I did have a lot of other -- I was certainly fascinated by chemistry relatively early. But I found it a bit disappointing, and I suspect it was not as sophisticated. The toys of that era were pretty primitive compared to today.

Where did you grow up, and how did that have an influence on you, if so?

George Rathmann: I grew up in Milwaukee and stayed there right through high school, and haven't been back all that much since then, because I went on to college and then moved to other places in the country.

But I met my wife-to-be in Milwaukee in high school, so I also had an extra incentive to do spectacular things once in a while, which I found to be -- but I think that she was as impressed with my growing a gardenia tree as she was with my explosions. Anyway, I figured out ways to get her attention in Milwaukee. So it was important I was in Milwaukee, or I never would have met her. We both were in high school together, probably from early years in high school. Other than that, I think Milwaukee -- the school I was in had a wonderful science program, and that was a factor. It was a private school, and even today sets the pace for the whole state in terms of the quality of the education that it produces. I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship, and was very, very impressed with the teachers that were absolutely dedicated. When you teach in a private school, you're dedicated, because you're also a basketball coach and five other things. You might teach general science, biology, chemistry and physics. And you think something has to be clicking in those peoples' minds that they're really inspired to inspire kids. I was a beneficiary of that.

Were there any particular teachers that stand out for you?

George Rathmann: The science teacher, Mr. Leker -- gone for many years -- he wasn't particularly friendly. He was kind of grumpy, but science was everything in his life. And that came through to the kids, and he was quite patient with kids. He didn't need to be patient with me, but he had to be patient with some of the others in the science classes that took it on a little slower. But he was always challenging me, and it was very important. His way of challenging was that you would -- he'd give you a part-time job, and you'd get paid for it. But you'd have to take care of his garden, and then you had to do this, then you had to do that, because he was also the biology teacher. So I had a close affinity for him, because I was sort of his handyman for quite a while, and that's how he also had a chance to give you some extra special ideas and continue to stimulate you. So that's one. The math teacher was marvelous. Of course he had the benefit of also being the basketball coach, and I was on the basketball team. Of course, that's an inspiration. You've got to like that guy. Then, of course, when I went to college, there were four professors there that were wonderful teachers. So much so that the family recognized them, and our foundation made a contribution to a new laboratory and commemorated those teachers. They were quite astonished because teachers in college or universities are largely recognized for their academic work in connection with research. These were all brilliant research people. But the thing that impressed me was they brought into that classroom dedication and enthusiasm and inspiration, and I thought that's something that should be recognized. So our family did that.

What were their names?

George Rathmann: They were Dr. Bordwell, Dr. Basolo, Dr. Klotz and Dr. Burwell. Bordwell, Basolo, Burwell and Klotz, four professors at Northwestern, two of them in physical chemistry, one of them in organic chemistry and one in inorganic chemistry.

You mentioned growing a gardenia tree in high school. How did that come about?

George Rathmann: I took care of the greenhouse in the school, and I took care of the garden in connection with the science teacher. But we just happened to see that you could buy a gardenia tree for $5, and we made the quick business calculation that if you could sell gardenias for 50 cents apiece, you certainly were going to get more than 10 gardenias off this tree, and it would be a worthwhile business. So a friend and I bought the gardenia tree, and then we decided to sell the gardenias. We didn't do all that well on the sale, but we certainly enjoyed giving them away. What actually happened was we approached my wife-to-be with a gardenia, rapped on the door of her house and said, "Do you know we've got a gardenia here?" and she was really quite impressed until we said, "It's 50 cents." That was a heartbreak time. We left her with a gardenia anyway. So we became a philanthropic organization instead of a profit-making organization. But it was fun. Milwaukee is not a good place for a gardenia tree. It lasts one year. If you don't take it in and have good luck inside, then you've got to buy another one next year because the winters are too tough for gardenias.

Was she appalled that you asked her to pay, or did she forgive you once you gave it to her for free?

George Rathmann: She's never forgiven me, no. She obviously thought it was pretty funny, and we were the topic of conversation with many friends after that. "They actually came to my house and wanted me to buy the gardenia, can you believe that?"

Was that your first company?

George Rathmann: That's right, our first business enterprise. Yeah, I really hate to think what it might have predicted: total failure.

You say were always interested in medicine, but you ended up with your Bachelor's, Master's and Ph.D. all in chemistry. How did that come about?

George Rathmann: One of the influences of the professors at Northwestern was to encourage me. I really wanted to be a pre-med, but my professor advisor at that time redirected me to physical chemistry. He said, "Oh, you're so good at physical chemistry, and medical school is just a lot of memory, a lot of memory." So he really pushed me into Princeton, which was his alma mater, by the way. So it was hardly an objective set of advice, but Princeton was a wonderful, wonderful school. I was entranced by the idea that I was only a few blocks away from Einstein, and he was there. And I did meet him, and it was something that was important to me in going to Princeton, that Einstein himself was there.

What was your impression of him?

George Rathmann: The impression I had was based on his reputation, but I just marveled and wondered, in wonderment at this brilliant individual. The time that I was there was the last few years of his life. He was not an active participant in the symposia that I happened to see him at. He would be there. He'd come in. He wore kind of a smock, and he would come in and sit near the rear. And I never heard him say anything, but everybody was aware he was there. There were others at Princeton who were absolutely spectacular in their ability to analyze a new symposium speaker or a new colloquium discussion. And from nowhere they knew how to probe and dig into the actual core of the subject and make very insightful comments. It was an exciting place to go to school. But no, Einstein never made any comments as long as I knew him and as long as I saw him. And I, at most, probably saw him half a dozen times. He would frequently show up for the physics symposium, the mathematics symposia. And he would be there, but that was it.

When you saw that he was named "Person of the Century" by TIME magazine, did you think that was appropriate?

George Rathmann: Oh, yeah. I have to think, because it chokes me up a bit. The marvel of his brain and the contributions that he made exploiting that. When you're a reasonable scientist, and I was certainly not anything on that scale, but there's a level of appreciation that just dazzles, because you realize how far beyond what you ordinarily are doing in your thought process he was. And how this all comes about! This whole conference deals with this issue of how does someone move from this and that environment and this and that experience. Certainly genes are in the game. There's no doubt about it. He must have had incredible genes. But a patent clerk -- in a patent office --deciding to understand the creation of the universe?

Back to your childhood a little bit. You say you had an older brother. Where were you in the overall birth order?

George Rathmann: I was the last one. You know, there's certain predictions people love to make, and I don't know how valid they are. I think it's a huge advantage to be the last one. You've got brothers and sisters that are educating you from the first minute you're on the planet, and I had that benefit, absolutely. I had several parents and my older brothers and sisters. I was way late. I mean, my sisters were 14 and 15 years older than I was. My brother was seven-and-a-half years older. And I was being groomed for being a genius from the time I was two years old. They were all thinking they could pump me full of information that, if I could retain it, they'd have the fun of helping me learn faster than anybody around. So that was a huge benefit, being the last in the family. You get a lot of other advantages too. I think your parents are more mellow, and there's a whole bunch of nice things. So I think it's a very comfortable place to be. We notice in our own family -- we have five children -- and everybody feels like the youngest got the best deal.

What do you think of the idea that the younger siblings tend to be the more creative ones, if not outright rebellious?

George Rathmann: It certainly wasn't true with me. I was so orthodox it hurts. I was the person that went all the way through high school being despised by my classmates without realizing it, because I would carry on a dialogue with the teachers ad nauseam because I was so eager to make sure I pleased all the teachers as much as I possibly could. So I was not rebellious. My brother, who was the third in the family, but he quite a lot older than I -- and there's some corrections they take when there's a big gap in the family -- he was the rebellious member of the family, no question about it. Not me. I was docile, orthodox and a heck of a conformist.

What did your parents think about your going into chemistry?

George Rathmann: They only had one thing in mind: they wanted me to have a college degree. Neither of them had a college degree. My dad didn't get to finish high school. So that was an important thing. But they had -- at least the feeling I got, and maybe I incorporated my own ideas into these feelings -- but the feeling I got was, "Do what you love to do. Start there." And there was never any urging to say, "You should do this because you could make money," or "You should do that because it's more famous," or "You could do that because other people say do that." One thing my dad would have liked was that after I did whatever I wanted to do -- medicine, science, whatever -- that I would go to Harvard and get my MBA. That was some envy that he had, because he was a businessman. He felt that he'd had to pick up his business by osmosis, and it was a tough way to get a business career. He felt that it's a wonderful career, but somebody ought to take a running start by going to Harvard and get his MBA. He was very disappointed on that subject, that after I got my science degree, I went into science at 3M. But then, very quickly, because 3M was such a wonderful place, my dad was very proud of the whole thing, and that was the end of any discussions about going back and getting your MBA from Harvard.

Did he live to see what a great knack you had for business?

George Rathmann: No, he did not. He was clever enough to think I had a knack for business, because he wanted me to run his business, even though I was the youngest member of the family. That was his idea, that I should run his business. I was always the one he wanted to run it. It rarely endears you to your brothers and sisters when the youngest member of the family is being selected by the father. It's a dangerous track to go on. The fact that I turned him down didn't make things any better, because here I was turning him down for jobs that others would have liked very much to have been invited to do. But my dad, that's the way he felt. He may have been one of the few people in the world that had any idea that I might do something in the business realm, because I was really totally engrossed in science.

What do you think he saw in you that made him think that?

George Rathmann: I think it was probably personality.

My dad was a very, very effective salesman, and his interpersonal skills were magnificent. He was patient. He was thoughtful. He was absolutely sincere. He was extremely honest. Those were his characteristics, and I think they were -- I don't mean that I was the only one in the family that had those characteristics -- but I think kind of being in that direction might have been not exactly the criteria that you use today to select your CEO. In fact, probably the very weakness that I probably display is that I like to be the good guy, and I don't like to beat people up, and I don't imagine anything wonderful about taking control and affecting these peoples' lives. I want them to do the best they know how to do, and not tell them how they have to do it, or keep them from doing what they like to do. So I probably -- almost to a flaw -- I'm on that side of the equation where I don't fit the pattern of the corporate executive who behaves in, at least in our minds, behaves in a different way.

What attracted you to 3M initially?

George Rathmann: There were quite a number of things. I had heard about them. I had seen something on the highways that I couldn't quite understand, and that is that my headlights would cause something to come back from the center line, as if it was lit up. It was called center light. It was a 3M product, and it was a very interesting optical product, because I knew enough about optics to know that if light hits the surface, it bounces off the other way. Angled incident, angled reflection. But not that stuff. Light would hit it coming in at a steep angle, and it would come back to the source, and that just astonished me. And that, of course, is the principle behind Scotchlite.

I invited myself to 3M to interview from Princeton which, in those days, was unusual. You had courtship from DuPont and all the other companies, and you didn't try to cultivate any company, they cultivated you. Nineteen fifty-one was a very good year. So I went there to see them and said I wanted to find out what they had. Then I was really impressed, because there was stuff in every closet that was doing something very different. There was a copying process for making copies of things that was dry, and that turned out to be Thermofax. It was a big success for about three years, and then it was a failure. But it was a huge impact on me that, my gosh, somebody figured out how to do something totally different, very fast, very clever. And there was fluorochemicals that were just absolutely marvelous. They'd gotten access to fluorochemicals which had very little surface tension, very unusual behavior. I thought that this place is just bubbling over with novelty, originality, creativity. I thought this is the place I would like to work, and that did it.

Also, not that it was unimportant, but I was able to get a job that was totally unrelated to anything practical. It was a basic science job, studying light scattering, the structure of molecules.

When you come from Princeton, your motivation is to do something basic and never, never, never get corrupted by something practical. So I was looking for the job that was absolutely as close to pristine science as I could find, and they had that too. So they satisfied all my interests in terms of creativity and energy and imagination and what seemed like -- and I really couldn't have picked it up on the interview trip, and maybe this I learned much later -- but it just seemed like there was a degree of freedom in the way they did things. And that, I did learn, was deeply ingrained in the way of doing things at 3M. It was a very deep philosophy that you had a lot of freedom, and the results of your life were on your shoulders. You had to learn that policy was a point of departure. Having the time and energy to put something together yourself -- you were allowed 15 percent of your time, and sometimes it was a lot more than that. You were encouraged to be the best that you could be at all times. There were very few rigid rules about what you couldn't do, lots of opportunity to do what you might want to do, and it was a great culture. I don't think I picked it up on the interview trip, but I was thrilled when I found out that that was the way it was.

Fifteen percent of your own time to do what?

George Rathmann: To try something brand new and different outside your program. It's a little misleading, because if you've got work to do, you've got to get your work done. But...

You could try things, and that's how Scotchgard came about. I tried some things that I thought might work. Before I was there for even four or five years, most of the programs I worked on were my own innovation, because they just sounded like they were interesting. I kept my job going and then I'd do something else, and then that would be -- I'd be encouraged to do that even if -- and that was another concept at 3M is, "Let's never get so tough on people that we don't let them fail. We would like to create a climate where people are willing to take a chance and fail," because that's the only way they will try another tough experiment. They'll never try a tough thing if they get beat up every time it doesn't work out. So as long as you learn something from the failure, put it behind you, and get on with the next thing. So there were lots of things at 3M that were very wonderful. In fact, when people from Amgen went to 3M, 20 years later, after I had left, to visit them, they said, "Well my gosh, now we know how we got the principles on which Amgen was built," which was very much that way. The freedom of the individual to make his own contribution, the feeling that the power in the organization was at the bottom of the organization, not coming down from the top. The good ideas, they were in there somewhere, not necessarily to be injected by the top. Now those are all principles of 3M that are really magnificent.

Can you tell us how Scotchgard came to be?

George Rathmann: Well, that was pure chance. We were doing basic research, making samples of polymers, which were all fluorochemicals, and my technician spilled some on her shoe. It was a tennis shoe...

Can you explain for our lay audience what a fluorochemical is?

George Rathmann: It's a class of molecules that are so distinct that they behave almost totally different from the kinds of things we see.

If you take gasoline, for example, and produce the counterpart that substitutes a fluorine atom for a hydrogen atom -- and a fluorine atom is just a different part of the periodic table -- but if you substitute those fluorine atoms, you totally change the properties of the molecule. And you make it so that it practically has no surface tension, which means, in contrast to the way water behaves where it kind of curls up at the edges, this liquid just spills and just goes everywhere at one time. It's got very low surface tension. The property of Scotchgard, of course, was that nothing can wet the surface. The surface is very low surface tension. What it requires to wet something, you have to have a -- well, it's complicated. But the fact is, that a Scotchgard surface behaves like wax. Wax is a step toward a fluorochemical. It has lower energy than other surfaces. So if you think about things that oil and water will stick to, you can get a whole array. And at the very extreme end, the one that's most resistant is a fluorochemical. We knew all that, except that we didn't know is how to put it on a fabric so that it would stay.

And when my technician said, "It's staying on my shoe day after day after day..."

She spilled the material on her shoe from one of our experiments, and she was -- it was her invention. It really wasn't mine. She was smart enough to realize after about two weeks that that thing hadn't gone away. And then when she put water on it, it beaded up just like you would predict for a fluorochemical. It was totally oil and water resistant, and it was permanent. And that was the amazing thing. So that this way of applying a fluorochemical as an elastic material -- or a high molecular weight material, however you want to define it, a totally different type of structure -- was exactly the right way to do it. So what happened is I coated up some fabric that was around there that had been used for tests, hoping to find a textile treatment, and I coated it up and I did it. By good fortune, I did it under various conditions, different concentrations and different sources of the polymer. I sent those in for evaluation. I knew they looked good to me, but I was not in a position to say the are better than anything else we'd ever seen. But when I put them in for evaluation, it took a while for them to be looked at, because everybody kind of assumed there wasn't much there, that we hadn't done anything really remarkable, just coated these fabrics up. But finally, when a new person was hired, and he had the job of making sure we did a careful evaluation of all the new ideas, and when this idea was evaluated, he said, "This is the most spectacular material we've ever seen." That was the beginning of Scotchgard.

Unfortunately, very recently (2000), Scotchgard was discontinued. I'm still grieving over that, because you fall in love with something like that, and for a long time you feel very good about all the things that it's done. I think, frankly, it will be rejuvenated some day, but right now it's been discontinued.

Did you have part of the patent on that because you helped create it?

George Rathmann: There was no patent that was in my name. The work was all done under my supervision, and that was a way of identification. It's been my feeling all along that when work is done by the person, the person that puts the thing on the fabric, or the person that makes the observation, the person that carries out the experiment and makes it work, is the one that should always -- I don't believe in the fact that the supervisor should be on every paper. Now in the academic world, you have to do this, because the professor has to build his reputation so he can have the prestige that the university wants for some of their key people. But I like the system much better where you don't put your -- I was on a few patents, and I fought that every time. I thought that that was almost always inappropriate. There was always somebody I thought did a more vital part of the work.

It was a 3M patent, wasn't it?

George Rathmann: Yes. Oh, yes. Yes.

And did the lab technician who spilled it on her shoe get on the patent?

George Rathmann: No. It turned out that she didn't get on the patent either which is always a little bit of a grief. It was the people that refined the choice of the molecule. We knew it worked, but you had to find out how to make exactly the right molecule. Those people got on the patent which was fine. It's the people that really did the hard work. They had to put the energy in to get from a primitive result to a commercial result.

One thing we often hear scientists say is that making mistakes is very much part of the job. If you're not experimenting and failing, then you're not in a position to have a triumph in the lab. But when you combine business and science, aren't you looking at a financial risk that pure scientists don't have to deal with?

George Rathmann: It's almost like you have this thing switching back and forth. If you don't allow people to fail, you really turn off the spigot of creation, because they're not going to be taking chances. But there's another extreme that can be very costly and totally ineffective. That is science for its own sake, and it's hard to see how you get the right balance. I think it's just people.

Sometimes there's the cynic in the lab that actually does a lot of good, and he says, "Well, you know, it would be nice to believe everything you say, but I'm going to limit my conclusions to the ones that are really proven. So I don't think you've proved this yet, I don't think you've proved that yet." You keep yourself from being carried away with enthusiasm, which you need, but unsound enthusiasm which you can't afford. So I think the give and take between scientists -- even when individuals make the key contributions -- the teamwork associated with challenging their ideas and making sure that you don't get trapped into something that's very comfortable, that you continue to look at, because you tell yourself it's working well, when it really isn't. So there's a balance there. There is a huge mistake that can be made on those strictly academic -- allow people to go on forever into a field and never have to be tested with whether it's commercially interesting. Or the other, that if you can't tell me what the reason to do this is and you can't guarantee me success, I won't let you start the program. Well, that's where you fail. But the 3M system is proof of how to do it. I mean, that's what I could take with me to both Abbott Labs and Amgen: the idea that you allow people to feel that they're taking on programs that they might fail at, but if they fail, they're going to be learning something, and they can go on from there.

That's the way I think you have to run your businesses. That dimension of some prudence is obviously needed. The way you achieve that, I think, is with the structure of the organization. I don't think you do it from the top down. You let the organization itself have mechanisms by which it monitors its own performance, and challenges itself to the best possible programs that can be found.

How do you structure a company so that it monitors its own performance, without doing it from the top down, as you said?

George Rathmann: Well, it could be quite informal. Ordinarily what you end up doing is having periodic reviews that are relatively formally done. But I'd say for the first seven or eight years at Amgen, it was done almost in the hallways. The culture was that we want to be the best we can be; we want to do the best science we can do. We want to make sure that we're moving along productive channels. Don't do your friend down in the lab a favor by not mentioning it to him when you think that he's probably gone beyond his data and he's not got the opportunity to do as much as he was hoping for. Just go ahead and have that discussion and upgrade the quality of everything everybody is doing.

So you're entrusting people. Everybody is empowered to make a difference in the company?

George Rathmann: Right, and some people view that as a terrible risk. "You're the boss and you're out of control!" You're putting a lot of confidence in what people are going to do. The modern world is empowering them. It really turns out that there's no other alternative that comes anywhere near close. Maybe, if there were an Einstein that was a businessman, maybe you could have done it with that brain power. But the rest of us mortals are better served by having the organization provide the brain power, because an 80-person organization is a lot more powerful than any brain that I know. And that's where the answer is. You get the people empowered to do the best they can, challenge each other. They understand the goals of the company, which is very important. The goals should be stated broadly and clearly and with a lot of flexibility. But it helps a lot for them to realize that there is that translation of the commercial dimension that will make it possible for them to have a job in the future. So it's easy to get the commitment, but it's hard to get the balance just right. Fortunately, it works out lots of times. It's hard to imagine why it works out as well as it does, where you get the right balance between sticking with good science and then translating it over into commercial success.

You have a great reputation for selling your companies and inspiring people to invest in them. Have there been periods when you've doubted yourself?

George Rathmann: Do you mean doubted whether I was saying the right thing to somebody, or doubted whether the company was going to be successful? We ran into some miserable experiences at both Amgen and ICOS, and we certainly can see them in the company I'm now with. Sometimes they relate to reversals that have nothing to do with the individuals and the science and the programs that you have. The business cycle just takes over and drives people away.

There was a period in 1994 when the cycle was affected by the concept of national health care, and the possibility that there wouldn't be any profits, because in national health care there would be price controls. As investors began to worry about that -- and at that same time, a few major programs failed -- it became clear that this was a foolish place to invest, because on the one hand, you can fail and get nothing back, or you can succeed, then have price controls and have a very limited return. And as a result of that, stock prices --including the stock price of the second company I was with, ICOS -- dropped off by 82 percent in about an eight-month period. So you are at one point and you're 82 percent down. You have very tense investors, and you might question yourself. I never questioned myself. The science was good, we were doing good things, and I think it was an artificial factor that we're going to learn how to beat.

Now we didn't just sit by...

The Industrial Biotechnology Association went ahead and started having programs, fly-ins, to try to convince congressmen that this was a devastating approach for the biotechnology industry, that we would scuttle the biotechnology industry if we destroyed investor confidence. The biotech industry was in the fortunate position that it could clearly demonstrate the close linkage between the financing of the company and the ability to do the research and development. Without the finance, you can't run the company. Whereas, a big pharmaceutical company, the possibility exists that they'd be able to continue their research and development, even if their prices were cut by ten percent or 15 percent. So what difference does it make? But when you scare investors so that they won't want to invest in the companies, that was the only source of money we had. We had no ongoing businesses, and so stocks went to nothing. And you could wonder whether this was going to be reversed in any way. I don't know. I don't think it was self-confidence. It was confidence in the system in this country, and the people in this country, and the Congress, that we were going to be able to convince them that this was a bad thing. We could convince them easier because the biotech equation was a beautiful equation. We were not doing "me too" things. We were not spending money on advertising and so on. Everything was going into research and development, and everything was beautiful science.

The fact that we were poor didn't mean we were bad. We hadn't gotten there yet, that was all. So the story was a very good story, and it went over very well.

When I testified in Washington a number of times, I'd be side-by-side with the pharmaceutical industry, and we were both supposed to be under the gun. And even Dave Pryor, who was a demon on pricing of drugs, would look at me and say, "I don't even have to talk to you. You guys are doing it right." And then he'd go back after the pharmaceutical industry, and I would sit there, supposedly helping. But I didn't have much to say, because he was already convinced we were the guys in the white hats. So it was fun to have that opportunity, and it was certainly true that we had a much better profile of doing really innovative -- no one had ever figured out that there was a way to replace red blood cell transfusions. So that product is not something that has -- erythropoietin -- has no counterpart in history. And a white cell generator, people just wouldn't have thought there was any way to do that. Nature was doing it, but how do we capture what nature does? Well, that's what biotech is all about. They're making nature in its very most exquisite way. So it was a good story that we could do things that never had been done before, but we needed the research. We needed the confidence in this kind of an industry. And it meant that there had to be confidence that there would be a profitable return. So I'd say I never lost faith in the system, because it was the system that was making it really heard.

If, in fact, it's inevitable, because people say that's the direction things are moving -- that would be devastating for the industry. So I don't support any of those steps, including the first one. I don't think the President ever intended what was construed from what was said.

Do you think there's a problem for the biotech companies, and for the quality of research if everything is made public?

George Rathmann: Oh no, I haven't an argument about making research public. The argument is about making rights belong to other people. If you transfer rights to Tony Blair, so that no matter what we've done here, they have the same rights and the same ownership, the same intellectual property ownership, that would be a devastating step.

The communication of scientific information is a beautiful part of our whole scientific system. What people don't realize, it's a beautiful part of the patent system because when you file a patent application, you must put in there every detail, to make it possible for the person who gets that patent, or reads that patent, to be able to -- he's got to be enabled to do everything you say. You have to be more explicit than in a publication, because in a publication you can kind of leave out something, because you think that I'd like to maybe stay ahead of my competition here for a while, and I won't mention that they better have humidity less than five percent. I'll just leave that out. And people sometimes do that. I don't think it's a great plan, but there are things that don't necessarily have to be included. But in the patent application, if there's something left out, the patent is invalid. Now what does that mean? The patent is filed with a complete disclosure, and it's published 18 to 20 months later. So anybody in the world can read that information. It's accessible to them. So the patent system is perfectly compatible with having the information flow. And that doesn't just apply to biotech, that applies to everything. What is not compatible with the way we do things in this country is to say, "We're going to make you give those things away. We don't believe you should own the gene. We don't believe you should own a protein. We don't believe you should own a medicine. We don't believe you should own a therapeutic or a diagnostic. We think those things are terrible because you charge money for them, and we like to have them free. So we don't believe in the ownership of these things." That's very hard for me, because I don't know how you'd proceed to get these things done.

It costs $500 million to get a product approved by the FDA. Do you want to spend that kind of money knowing that as soon as you finish and you've proved that it works, anybody in the world anywhere can make that product and sell it into the marketplace? You just can't do it. You won't ever spend the $500 million. At the end of it, it's a very hard ethical call. After erythropoietin was found, and we beat the world to get to the erythropoietin molecule, there was a judge in Boston who said, "I want to see as many erythropoietin producers as I can. I'm interested in the public welfare here." Well, that's interesting. So you'd say, almost, the patent system opposes the public welfare because the patent system does not permit all the manufacturers in the world. It limits it to the person who made the discovery. But there's an interesting cycle there. If no one has the motivation to make the discovery, who's going to make the discovery? So after you have the discovery, it may seem like a very generous humanitarian thing to do is to have everybody get the discovery free of charge. But you've got to watch out of what the impact of that decision is on the rate of discovery of new things. So it's a very complicated story. It always sounds kind of bad. It sounds kind of like it's greed, and it doesn't sell well. But a slowly improving understanding by the public would be a very desirable thing. They ought to really understand the creation of products that link very closely to the creation of knowledge, and it's a hard distinction. When you create knowledge, it's a wonderful thing, and it should be free to everybody. When you start creating products that require a significant investment, it's another ballgame.

You've said that you have had trouble retiring.

George Rathmann: I really haven't taken it very seriously. That's the reason. I think I could do the job if I put my mind to it!

When you left Amgen was the purpose to retire?

George Rathmann: It was to disengage. I didn't assume I'd ever be totally retired. When I resigned as CEO, I stayed on as chairman. But when I resigned as CEO, I thought I'd probably find myself involved, to a much less degree, with a lot of companies, but before I resigned as Chairman of Amgen, I had already been appointed as Chairman of ICOS. So it seemed appropriate that the right way to retire would be to have chairman jobs, instead of the whole CEO job and have that in two companies. That seemed about ideal. I had already decided I didn't want to be on ten boards. A lot of our board members were almost professional board members, and they loved it. Ten boards, they got ten different stimuli and all the rest of that. But I found that to be a little too superficial for my thinking. I'd rather have a more intense involvement. I knew I couldn't afford to be president and CEO of many companies. That's a big job. That's a full-time job. But chairman of two companies sounded fine with me. So that was my plan. And Amgen agreed, and ICOS agreed. So now I was chairman of both companies. That lasted for five months.

We had a very successful private round of financing at ICOS, including attracting Bill Gates to put in $5 million. And we raised $33 million. The people in the banking area, Paine Webber, made it very clear, after that was done, that I had to resign from the job I had at Amgen, because people were skeptical that after making this investment, that I was going to be able to devote enough time to the company. I tried to say, "Well, you know, being on the board and Chairman of Amgen is not a big responsibility. It's run by the CEO. You have to understand that." But there was a lot of pressure. So I approached Amgen and said, "Well, it was very nice of you to allow me to do both, but I can't do both." And they said, "Well, you're the boss. If you say you don't want to do it, we'll find a way to handle it, but we'd like you to stay." And I said, "I just can't do it." So I left the Board -- I left the chairmanship -- I did stay on the board for a couple more years, and then I was exclusively ICOS. Then, when it came time to look at this latest retirement... I retired from ICOS in a sense as a retirement, knowing full well by that time that there was another tiny little biotech company that I really would like to help, and that was Hyseq. So I told them that before I even resigned. I was out of a job for a half an hour. The ICOS board meeting occurred and finished, and I was no longer there, and the Hyseq board meeting started a half-hour later, and I got in and was appointed Chairman. That recently changed over to become President and CEO. It's easy to be a President, Chairman and CEO. That's not hard. It's hard to do two companies... and I was fairly aware that I'd probably end up with a change. So I knew I probably should just resign at ICOS, and I did. I actually resigned from the board at the same time. So I really am not associated with ICOS anymore.

What's the lure of starting a new venture? It's almost like a rollercoaster ride.

George Rathmann: It's probably some form of stupidity, but it really turns out to be the opportunity to make a difference. It really is so clear.

When you get to a large company -- even though you started as a tiny company -- when you get to a large company, you know full well they can get along without you. And that's great. That's the way it has to be. But when you look at a small new one, you get the feeling that it could go under, or it could fail to see anywhere near its full potential. So you can make a huge difference. And it may be arrogance. There's certainly an element of pride there. But I think it's a fun thing to think about all the things you might be able to do -- and you find out. Of course, you get this impression anyway when you start dealing with people and they say, "Oh my gosh, you've done that already, and you've done that already. Ah, if you'd just tell me about how to do this." I spent two-and-a-half hours this morning -- that's why I missed the morning session -- because somebody heard I was going to be in Phoenix, and they just wanted to talk to me about their new company. We talked for a couple hours on a company that has five employees, but they've got a long way to go. And they can make it. I mean, they can make it. They just need to get encouragement, and I don't want to join that board. I've got plenty to do. But at least once in a while, when you see that the person needs more than advice; he needs maybe some leadership and some direct involvement by somebody, then you feel like, "I think I'd like to do it." But it's hard to make a difference when you're just going to be an advisor. I may make a difference in that company this morning. May happen again and again, because a lot of people come by. But I always have the fear that a little bit of advice could be very dangerous. Whereas, you put yourself into it, it's your life. Then what you do is probably going to be more productive. So you get the feeling -- I still have the feeling that this new company -- there's a lot of things I can do there. I've been there now 120 days. I probably have ten years of work ahead of me to make sure that it realizes its full potential, but that's very exciting. I think that's what is exciting.

What attracted you to Hyseq?

George Rathmann: They had unusual technology, and it was also the first time I've been able to tie in with a genomics company. So whatever everybody has been talking about for five years, the genomics revolution, I've missed it. We were doing other things, and they're exciting, and there are other ways to work with genes. It's all genes. But the idea of actually starting with a gene that you don't know what it does is a totally different way to start than starting with looking for a gene for something that you know what it does.

And so ordinarily I'd say it's pretty obviously which I'd rather do. I'd rather look for the gene that I know what it does than get a gene that I don't know what it does, except what if you could get 35,000 genes that you don't know what they do? Now you have an opportunity that's got great value, potential value. So one gene, give me one that I know something about. Thirty-five-thousand? I can't get 35,000 I know something about. The only way I can get 35,000 is to do gene sequencing for the sake of sequencing. So we had a very clever, fast, accurate technique for doing that, and we got all these genes. And now you say, "Well, now what do we do?" Well, now it's a combination of biology and medicine and probably some good luck and some very clever thinking, some of the thinking that's called informatics today, which is using information to decide which of the genes are the best, and extracting information from the gene to do that. So it's almost a whole new dimension in biotech, and that was very fascinating. I thought, "I've missed this. I better do it."

Do you think you might ever again retire for 30 minutes?

George Rathmann: I don't think I've really learned it yet, but I think I might! Maybe even longer. But there's a certain number. We have a pretty big family, and the family has its own ideas about how long I should retire for. I don't think I quite hit the threshold at 30 minutes, but I think they also know that it sort of runs in the family. My dad worked till he was 80, and my brother worked until the last day of his life. I didn't have any strong desire to emulate this. In fact, I didn't think it was all the smartest thing in the world, but I can see why it happened, because it's a dimension of your life that becomes very important. You're not inhibited from doing a lot of other things too. So we do a lot of things.

You may have the non-retirement gene.

George Rathmann: Yes. It may be a dominant too. I'm a little afraid that it may be passed on to the rest of the family.

Looking to the future, do you think the biotech industry will continue to be a dominant one in our world?

George Rathmann: Oh, yes. The amazing thing is it's so powerful and up until now, absolutely benign. Maybe something is going to come along that suggests an unpleasant side. There were all these fears back in the early '80s. I lived through some of those debates, and some deterrents to good research. Bernadine Healy is here today. She was in one of these sessions where there was a vigorous debate that we should stop biotechnology. I was pleased to see her, she's a very nice lady. She was in charge of the National Institutes of Health later on, and has a great career, but we happened to be on a panel together, about 1985, and we were really tooth and nail as to whether we should be allowed to continue in biotechnology. There were a lot of concerns, and all of this has more or less been left behind us, because the science has been so productive and so benign.

Although you've got these scary ethical issues -- and they really are scary -- dealing with possibly altering human beings and so on. So you know it's very powerful, but the wisdom of people up 'til now has been so clearly demonstrated that it's channeled to doing good. And the good is literally unlimited. Today we know of diseases that we've been studying for years. They've been high priority to solve. I mean, cancer is one. Cardiovascular disease is another. Diabetes, one that we've made a lot of progress on, is another. These diseases, you rank them together and there's lots of different ways of looking at it. One is in terms of the cost to society, which is in the $500 billion range, just in the United States alone. Another is the numbers of individuals that have their life compromised forever, because these are violent diseases that take a terrible toll and so on. You'd say, "Well, can biotech do anything about that?" It will. It will go after every single one of these diseases, and there's progress every day. So the future, I think, is so attractive that I wouldn't like to have every one of these young people go into biotech, because I think they should pick the choices that they should make. They should make the things -- if they want music, they want to be a mystery writer -- and that's the wonderful thing about this conference, that they have stimulus in any direction they need it, and that's wonderful. But I certainly would say that anybody that happens to be fascinated by biotechnology is not going to be disappointed with where it's going to go and how far it's going to get us. I think it's going to be much more a problem-solver than a problem-creator. And it has been up 'til now.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.

George Rathmann: You're welcome.