Is managing scientists different from managing businesspeople?
It’s very different. Scientists often think about life in longer time frames than a traditional businessperson—they think about having a five-year National Institutes of Health grant. A lot of times, particularly in startup biotech, you don’t have that luxury of time and capital. But the science will not succeed without the business, and business won’t succeed without the science. The science produces the results and builds the milestones, but it has to be in the framework and the discipline of how you fund it and build wealth for shareholders. What, in your view, are the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. drug–approval process? If you look at the majority of drugs developed in the world today, they come from U.S.-based pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The ability to do strong, private research in these companies—built on a lot of the foundations that come from places like the NIH and from our great academic centers—that’s our great strategic advantage. Some of the challenges, t
