One in a Billion by Mark Johnson

Author:Mark Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter 16

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I’m Going to Tell You a Story

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AUGUST 2009

Although he was one of the founders of PhysioGenix, this will be Howard Jacob’s last board meeting. Over the past three months, he has sold enough of his ownership stake that he will no longer have a say in how the company is run.

Brian Curry, who is taking over as PhysioGenix’s chief executive officer and president, worries that the meeting will be “horrible.” He knows of one other instance in which a founder’s ownership was diluted and by all accounts, it wasn’t pretty. After three months of negotiating, Curry still wonders whether Jacob is ready to walk away from this company he founded more than a decade earlier. When Jacob started PhysioGenix in 1997, it was to make use of the expertise he and his colleagues had built up through their work with rats. The company began selling animals—“rat packs,” former CEO John Seman called them—that were bred to have certain traits, such as diabetes. The traits allowed researchers to use the rats for specific experiments. But PhysioGenix has evolved away from that business model and is now finding success using its unique rats to conduct research studies for scientists and industrial customers.

Jacob is actually pleased to be stepping aside; within a year he will be out of the company completely. In his mind, PhysioGenix was based on a great idea but started too early. If zinc finger technology, which made gene editing much faster and cheaper, had been there from the beginning, the company might have been more successful.

Instead of turning tense, the meeting goes well. It is pleasant, no disruptions. Curry breathes a sigh of relief.

When it is clear there is no more company business, Jacob speaks up.

“I’m going to tell you a story, and if you stay, you are going to write a check.” No one moves, and Jacob tells them about the young boy at Children’s Hospital with a condition that has stumped every doctor he’s met.

“I think we can sequence his genes, and I think we can save his life,” he says. “Can you help make this happen?”

It takes all of two minutes. Jacob is low key but extremely confident.

Curry is stunned. Not by the fact that Jacob is talking about sequencing all of the boy’s genes. Jacob has been saying for years that his goal is to bring this technology to humans. Curry is stunned that after three months of negotiations that are going to take his company away from him, Jacob is already moving on.

“We had made the decision about it,” Jacob later said. “It was over. And the Nic thing was the next thing.”

After hearing Jacob’s pitch, Jeffrey Harris is one of the board members who decides to contribute. Harris has invested in many young companies, including PhysioGenix, since leaving his job as general counsel of Apogent Technologies. This is the first time he is making a donation to Children’s Hospital. “Knowing a lot about what Howard is doing in

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