Lucid Lamentations & Larry Bock

Here’s my Lux Capital partner Larry Bock lucid lamentations on the woeful state of science in the US, what it means for competition, entrepreneurship and venture capital. Larry has been the founder and initial chief executive officer of MetraBiosystems, Inc., Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc. [NBIX], Pharmacopeia, Inc. [PCOP], Argonaut Technologies, Inc. [AGNT], and Caliper Technologies Corp. [CALP]. Mr. Bock was also a co-founder of ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, Inc. [ARIA], Athena Neurosciences (acquired by Elan Pharmaceuticals [ELN] for $700 million), GenPharm International (acquired by MedaRx), Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. [VRTX], Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Inc. [ONXX] and Illumina, Inc. [ILMN]. Most recently, Larry organized the San Diego Science Festival, a month-long celebration of science and the impact of science and innovation on our lives. The festival culminated in a day-long expo in San Diego, and was the West Coast’s largest science event. Larry holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Bowdoin College and an M.B.A. from the Anderson School at the University of California, Los Angeles.

What was the inspiration for the San Diego Science Festival?
As a serial entrepreneur in the life sciences, I found that I could no longer hire Americans to fill positions in the companies I was putting together, because they weren’t going into those scientific fields. Then, when I took my family abroad, I saw these wonderful international science festivals—in particular the Cambridge, UK festival, the Edinburgh festival, and the Italian and Indian festivals—that have been going on for years. These festivals had not yet come to the U.S. (two were in formation on the East Coast), so I though, “OK, I want to create the largest science festival on the West Coast.”

Tell me more about the sad state of science in America – can you cite any anecdotes or quick statistics?
Nobel laureate Richard Smalley once said, “By the year 2010, 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers will live in India and Asia.” And right now, 85% of the people taking degrees in the advanced physical sciences in the United States are from abroad. It’s sort of a perfect storm of events. Americans are not going into these areas, and the foreigners who are pursuing these fields are not being retained here because of visa issues, and more importantly because the opportunities are now greater abroad. Right now we’ve probably got the largest brain drain of scientists in the history of the United States ever.

Another report that just blew me away came from the government. It’s called “The Rising Tide” and it’s filled with facts and figures. For instance, South Korea produces more engineers than the United States. There is another statistic that rates the quality of engineers, and there are more high quality engineers in India than in the United States.

What do you think got us into this situation?
Well I think it comes down to that Dean Kamen quote, “We get what we celebrate.”
We celebrate sports stars and Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, and sure enough that’s what young people want to become.

Is the media partially to blame?
Yes. The media is also really deceiving in making the public believe that the United States is at the forefront of technology. My awakening occurred when an individual I had hired to work for a company in the U.S. went back to China and formed a company 10 times the size for a fraction of the cost doing the same thing overseas.

Now just to play devil’s advocate – even though that company is now in China creating jobs there, isn’t it also benefitting the U.S. biotech companies that can inexpensively outsource?
Yes, companies can outsource, but I fundamentally believe that jobs will ultimately co-localize where science and innovation is taking place. My best example of that is Genentech [DNA]. Genentech didn’t put its manufacturing facilities in Singapore, they put them in Vacaville, CA because with any new science, the manufacturing jobs need to co-localize with where the technology takes place, because there is still so much research involved in the manufacturing process. As a result of that geographic decision, the United States has had a 30-year exclusive hold on biotechnology, and it’s not until just recently that some of that work is being outsourced overseas. That’s my argument for why we need to keep the innovation happening here.

To that point of co-localization, how do we create the next great innovation hub like Silicon Valley? What are the ingredients necessary for a region to attract and retain top scientists?
Well I think it’s clear that you need leading research in the area, so these regions typically cluster around major nucleuses of academic labs. You also need to have the capital within proximity, because venture capitalists don’t like to get on an airplane. And finally you need to have a success story to rally around. If you look at San Diego as an example, it’s probably one of the three leading centers of biotech in the world. It’s because we had a company called Hybritech, which pretty much kick-started the whole revolution. Most people dismiss that point, but most major biotech companies evolved from Hybritech and that entrepreneurial spirit. Another example of this is in the middle of nowhere in Warsaw, Indiana, where you have some of the largest orthopedic companies and dozens of startups. They are all there because one of them got started there and its success spawned all the rest.

So what was your expectation when you were launching the San Diego Science Festival?
Some of these international festivals have been going on for 15 years. The Cambridge festival in England drew about 50,000 people to it, and the Italian science festival (called the Genoa Festival) draws about 150,000 people. I didn’t think I could attract those numbers, but that was our long-term goal.

How did reality match up with your expectations?
Everybody told me I couldn’t count on more than 10,000 people showing up to a first-year event. Yet we attracted so many people that the police had to shut down Balboa Park, and at one point there was an 8-mile backup on the 163 Freeway! We easily had 50,000 people at the expo.

How did so many people hear about the Festival?
The way the festival worked was that we brought programs to the schools first, with the quid-pro-quo that the schools needed to broadcast information about the expo to their student bodies and networks. So it was more of a grassroots marketing effort.There is nothing as motivating as a teacher giving extra credit for students to go to the expo.

Who were some of the exhibitors at the expo?
They were everybody you can imagine in the science community: universities, community colleges, professional science societies, high school student clubs, community organizations, the military, and the leading high-tech and life science companies. We had 300 different exhibitors, with all degrees of sophistication. Lockheed Martin [LMT] brought flight simulators and virtual reality environments and immersive display screens straight out of Minority Report. The UCSD supercomputer center was making viruses out of marshmallows and toothpicks. Some community environmental organizations were even doing finger painting with algae.

What are some of the lessons that the teachers who attended the festival could take away about teaching science?
The problem with teaching is that the average teacher has been out of the scientific community for about 10 years. In today’s world, where the amount of information doubles every couple of years, the teachers can’t get access to what’s interesting. What we offered was some insight into what are the hottest topics. We are not teaching the fundamentals to the students, but we are giving them a sense of where science is important based on those fundamentals.

What’s the biggest problem with science education today, and what message do you hope attendees walked away with?
Our most pressing issue with science education is that we basically drum science interest out of our students. The way we teach science in the United States, our students learn a lot about facts and figures, but then at the end of the day they have no clue why that science is important in their lives and why they should be interested in it.
Whether it’s renewable energy, global energy, global warming, worldwide starvation, or disease—I don’t think there isa single national challenge we face today where science isn’t the potential apex for solving it, and we will need the next generation of scientists to solve these problems. I hope the Festival got people excited about science again.