Change Agents - Michael J. Fox and Deborah Brooks

Why Should It Take Such A Long Time?

In 1995, Debi Brooks, now 42, was a vice president in Goldman Sachs's asset-management division. Having grown up in a family of modest means, she considered this to be a home run: She was well regarded and well compensated, and she was rising through the firm's ranks. She had built her dream home on Nantucket.

Yet something was missing--several things were, actually. Flexibility, marriage, and a family. So she left Goldman and enrolled in a master's program for marital and family therapy. While living mostly on Nantucket, she went on to manage two nonprofit groups: the Harvard Eating Disorders Center and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

Then, through a series of Goldman connections, she heard that Michael J. Fox was looking for an executive director for his foundation. She knew nothing about Parkinson's disease, but she knew that this was the perfect job for her. It was both complex and entrepreneurial, a high-profile startup with heart. The following week, she was in New York, meeting with Fox and his ad hoc search committee. After the interview, Fox turned to his business partner Danelle Black and asked, "Where have you been hiding her?" A week later, Brooks went to work.

Here was her challenge: How could the foundation direct Fox's celebrity toward curing a mysterious neurological disease? Fox himself had taken a key first step by meeting with existing Parkinson's organizations and researchers to explore the opportunity. In doing so, the Hollywood icon forged credibility where it counted. His sincerity and seriousness--as much as his star value--impressed longtime advocates such as Joan Samuelson of the Parkinson's Action Network.

Brooks and Fox turned those early connections into an impressive board of directors, enlisting among others Lonnie Ali, the wife of former boxer and Parkinson's sufferer Muhammad Ali, and Morton Kondracke, the Washington journalist whose wife has Parkinson's. Fox also recruited DreamWorks SKG partner Jeffrey Katzenberg and film producer Kathleen Kennedy. Schenker rounded up Wall Street heavies, including Mitchell Blutt, executive partner of J.P. Morgan Partners.

Samuelson also led Fox and Brooks to William Langston, a leading researcher who heads the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale, California. Langston agreed to recruit a scientific steering committee whose members would help develop a research-funding strategy as well as evaluate grant applications. Like Samuelson, the researchers took to Fox quickly. On the one hand, he was a novelty--a big-time celebrity who was also intelligent and approachable. "Even scientists can be starstruck," says Michael Zigmond, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. On the other hand, Fox was a meal ticket, an attractive ally in researchers' quest for bigger budgets.

They would discover that Fox was something else too: impatient. The funding of scientific research has historically been a drawn-out affair. Grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are awarded nearly a year after applications are received. Why? Partly because of the volume and complexity of the requests. Partly because the applications are so long. And, well, partly because that's how it has always been done.

"We said, Why should it take such a long time?" recalls David Golub, a board member and managing director of Centre Partners Management. "We all had a sense of urgency. We weren't interested in a yearlong process." Brooks and Langston developed a fast-track granting process. Their application form would be far shorter, requiring much less preliminary data. A standing review board would expedite processing and selection. Their grants would take three months instead of a year.

Last December, two months after Brooks signed on, the Fox Foundation was ready to solicit funding applications. It advertised through an email newsletter for We Move, a group that promotes learning about movement disorders, and in two follow-up email broadcasts to 4,000 scientists. From that, the Foundation expected about 40 to 60 applications. Instead, apparently drawn by Fox's name, by the compressed application cycle, and by the unusually large grants of up to $125,000, nearly 200 researchers applied, seeking a total of about $20 million.

"We were like, Whoa!" Brooks recalls. "And the quality of the science, of the ideas being proposed, was strong and deep. It wasn't just a lot of fan mail." The NIH agreed. Not wanting to abandon potentially important science, it assented to coordinate a new round of funding for Parkinson's research. The agreement was pathbreaking on two counts. First, it would pool money from both government sources and private foundations, including Fox's. Second, it would integrate into the joint NIH program parts of the fast-track review process that Brooks and Langston had devised.