Disrupter - Stephen Friend

Three times in his life, Stephen Friend has made what he calls a "great leap into the unknown." Twenty-five years ago, he was a philosophy student in Indiana who decided to become a medical doctor. In the mid-1980s, after three years of pediatric training in Philadelphia, he moved to Boston and remade himself into a leading cancer researcher. And in 1996, he put away his lab coat to become president of Rosetta Inpharmatics Inc., a tiny Seattle-area genetics company with vast ambitions. In 1996, he put away his lab coat to become president of Rosetta Inpharmatics Inc., a tiny Seattle-area genetics company with vast ambitions.

Step into Friend's spartan office at Rosetta today, and it takes a moment to realize how audacious he really is. He is a stocky man with a slightly untucked shirt and standard-issue chinos. Only when he starts to explain his career -- and his goals that still lie ahead -- do his energy and passions tumble forth.

"Any time you make a switch, there's this zone of chaos," Friend says. "You realize that everything you've done so far in your life adds up to maybe just one-twentieth of what you need to know going forward. All of a sudden, you're about to start something completely different." For other people, that's terrifying. But not for Friend. "I'm happiest when I'm jumping blindly into a new area, going mostly on faith that it will work out somehow," he says. "I find it tremendously exciting."

So far, his gamble with Rosetta looks like a big winner. The Kirkland, Washington company is only five years old, but it has already become a landmark enterprise in the crusade to make sense of the human genome. Researchers at Harvard and Stanford and more than a dozen pharmaceutical and biotech companies now use the Rosetta Resolver Gene Expression Data Analysis System to analyze torrents of genetic data -- fast. And anyone who wants to swap gene-expression data online will likely use Gene Expression Markup Language, a free, public standard developed in large part by Rosetta.

Earlier this year, in a world in which so many bold young companies' hopes had been lofted -- and then crushed -- by the stock-market roller coaster, Friend and his fellow directors at Rosetta secured a safe, permanent home for their work. They negotiated the sale of Rosetta to one of the pharmaceutical industry's most dominant players -- Merck -- for $620 million. Two big parts of the deal: keeping Rosetta as a stand-alone business in Washington State, and making Friend a vice president for basic research at Merck.

The Making of a Maverick

It would be easy for Stephen Friend to coast a bit, enjoying the $18 million from his Rosetta stock holdings. But so far he hasn't even upgraded the Formica-topped furniture in his office. Instead, he is fascinated by the newest zone of chaos: a chance to help an organization as huge as Merck shake things up.

"What we're discovering about the human genome has implications in every stage from preclinical research to the point where you start putting new drugs into people," he says. "It's hard to imagine a company with greater resources and possibilities than Merck. I don't know how this will work out, but that's part of the excitement."

That's classic Stephen Friend, say people who have known him for many years. "He has always been on the cutting edge, eager and impatient," says Dr. Stephen Sallan, chief of staff at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. The two men worked closely together in the mid-1980s, when Friend was finishing a fellowship in hematology and oncology at Children's Hospital Boston and Sallan was supervising Friend's work.

Ironically, Friend grew up in a family that cherished the arts rather than the latest scientific breakthrough. His mother taught music theory at the Juilliard School in New York; his father was an acoustic engineer who also worked at Juilliard. Friend became a philosophy major at Indiana University and thought that he might make a career in medical ethics. But he decided that the only way he could truly understand the life-and-death issues that doctors face every day was to complete full medical training.

Then, partway through pediatric residency training at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, there came a turning point. Working round the clock with cancer patients, Friend met dozens of children who were stricken with awful, inexplicable diseases. Their anxious parents would always ask the same two questions: "Why does my child have this disease?" and "What can you do to treat it?" All too often, doctors -- Friend included -- couldn't give any useful answers. "You get such a feeling of emptiness," Friend recalls. "Spend time in pediatric oncology with these children and their parents, and what you see will drive you for the rest of your life."