Disrupter - Stephen Friend

Rather than trying to fight cancer one patient at a time with painfully inadequate tools, Friend moved to Boston in 1984 to pursue cancer research in hopes of one day benefiting many thousands of patients. In 1986, he scored a spectacular success when he isolated the gene associated with retinoblastoma, a fierce form of eye cancer. Working at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Children's Hospital Boston, he entered Boston's research elite.

Yet once again, Friend felt frustrated that he wasn't making more headway. "Knowing what was going on wasn't the same as being able to treat it," he recalls. What's more, Friend began to worry that Boston's enormous concentration of medical talent might be stifling advances instead of furthering them. "Everyone in Boston feels certain that they are working on the right next step in research," he later explained. "So if you say, 'I think I see a better way,' it's very hard. The natural impulse of everyone else is to say, 'I had that thought a few years ago, and it doesn't work.' "

All the while, job overtures were coming from Seattle. Lee Hartwell, a world-renowned geneticist and yeast researcher, was building up a genetics team at the University of Washington. Friend admired Hartwell's work and began to regard the nearby Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a place where mavericks could thrive. Before long, Friend was in Seattle for a one-year sabbatical at the Hutch. He then stayed on as director of molecular pharmacology there and also became professor of pathology at the University of Washington.

From Scientist to CEO

Friend's timing was perfect. The new field of bio-informatics was coming of age. Scientists were using sophisticated computer software to analyze a growing mountain of genetic data about yeast, mice, and, eventually, people. The Seattle area, home of Microsoft, was a hotbed of innovation. And a second breakthrough was occurring in the research lab of Leroy Hood, a genetics researcher who had just moved to the University of Washington.

One of Hood's scientists, Alan Blanchard, had devised a way to synthesize as many as 25,000 snippets of DNA onto a single laboratory slide, where they could be fixed neatly in place and used to analyze patterns of gene expression. Scientists had long wanted such a powerful analytical tool, but they had no idea how to build it without taking years or millions of dollars. It was Blanchard's genius -- or madness -- that inspired him to build such a tool by taking a standard Epson ink-jet printer, dismantling the printing head, loading it up with the building blocks of DNA, and then squirting DNA bases onto the slide with astonishing precision.

"All of a sudden, we had the potential to analyze everything that was going on inside a cell," Friend recalls. "This wasn't going to be just a cool little idea for three or four guys in a lab. It would take hundreds of people to do it. Academia couldn't be the right setting for it." Friend, Hartwell, and Hood began talking about the best way to combine various breakthroughs and exploit the combined opportunities. In late 1996, each of them realized: We'd better start a company.

Neither Hartwell nor Hood wanted to run the company full-time, so Friend stepped in as president. His parents -- who had been so proud of his careers in medicine and in research -- were dismayed. "They had always viewed business with suspicion," he says. But Friend threw himself into this new calling with gusto. He recruited scientists and engineers. He wooed venture capitalists. And in late 1997, he lined up $17 million from backers led by OVP Venture Partners and Vulcan Northwest Inc., the venture vehicle of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.

For its first 18 months, Rosetta made hardly a ripple. Its proprietary software had to be written and debugged. Its gene-array technology had to be perfected -- which was no small feat in Seattle, where high humidity periodically threatened systems that required virtually bone-dry conditions. From Hood's lab, Blanchard joined the team and began ordering Epson printer heads by the dozen.

"Do you want any ink cartridges with those?" a salesman asked at one point.

"No," the Rosetta scientists replied. "That won't be necessary."

Before long, Rosetta faced a crossroads. It could aim to be a high-volume producer of gene arrays itself and spend huge amounts of money setting up factories. Or it could concentrate mostly on cutting-edge research, licensing its technology to a bigger, more established company that would run the production lines. Friend decided that the latter choice was wiser. So he and his colleagues negotiated an alliance with Agilent Technologies, which now cranks out many tens of thousands of gene-array chips using Rosetta's know-how.