Genentech, Inc. Celebrates 25 Years with Gift to Bancroft: ROHO completes key oral histories
Genentech, Inc., the world's pioneer biotechnology company, celebrated its 25th anniversary last year with a generous pledge of $500,000 to Bancroft. The gift will fund through 2004 an ambitious new phase in the Program in the History of the Biological Sciences and Biotechnology.
Genentech, Annual Report. 1996 |
Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl expressed Berkeley's gratitude at a gala anniversary reception and dinner in the library in October. "With Genentech's support, Berkeley is building a national center for research in the history of biotechnology," he said. "Just as Genentech was the first in the industry to develop a commercial drug (human insulin) using recombinant DNA technology, Genentech is the first to support Bancroft's program for historical documentation of the industry." Arthur Levinson, chairman and CEO of Genentech, spoke at the reception about the day in 1979 he was approached about joining the fledgling biotechnology company. A postdoc at UCSF then, he had his whole professional career ahead of him when molecular biologist Herb Boyer and venture capitalist Robert Swanson came around and introduced their new enterprise. "Bob Swanson was very matter of fact," Levinson said. "He simply told me, 'Join us and you'll change the world.'" Levinson did. |
Genentech formed around the technology for cloning DNA, which was developed in 1973-74 by UCSF's Boyer and molecular biologist Stanley Cohen of Stanford. The company's work with recombinant DNA technology has resulted in the manufacture of nine protein-based products for serious or life-threatening medical conditions. This transfer of rDNA technology to the marketplace is common today, but at Genentech's founding it was all in the uncertain future.
"What we tried to do in the early days of Genentech was to create a culture where anything was possible," said the late Robert Swanson in his oral history.
The two Genentech founders and Levinson himself have recorded their oral histories under the research component of Bancroft's program. Their interviews join more than a dozen others completed or in progress since 1992 at the Regional Oral History Office. Other key participants in the biotechnology boom will document their stories soon, most of them while still fully active in their careers.
"Some historians would say you have to wait for the perspective of time," says science historian Sally Smith Hughes, who conducts most of the project's interviews. "As I see it, we have a responsibility to carry out historical research now, even among the younger players." In addition to oral history research, Bancroft's Program in the History of the Biological Sciences and Biotechnology features a sizable archive.
Curator David Farrell collects personal correspondence, laboratory notebooks, photographs, and other artifacts of the biotechnology industry. "The Bay Area is the center of the biotechnology universe," says Bancroft director Charles Faulhaber. "With such generous funding, and with our committee of distinguished advisers, headed by Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., we can keep Bancroft's research and archival programs on the cutting edge along with the science."
Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl (left) and Arthur Levinson (right). |
Though biotechnology interviews tend to emphasize relatively recent events, Hughes resists the temptation to be too timely in conducting the oral histories. She always seeks a historically grounded account of the science in its greater context.
"Biotechnology did not appear fully formed out of nowhere," she says. "There was a before, and there will be a very long hereafter."
—Laura McCreery,
Regional Oral History Office
Volume 20
Spring 2002
Table of Contents
From the Director: Bancroft's New Building?
Students Examine Original Documents
