AsianScientist (Jan. 28, 2014) – Scientists should go into business because they think their work will benefit society, not because they want to get rich, said a multidisciplinary panel of distinguished scientists at the Global Young Scientists Summit 2014 held at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) last week.
The panel, entitled “The Entrepreneur in the Scientist,” was chaired by Professor Bertil Andersson, president of NTU, and comprised Nobel Laureates Dr. Richard Roberts (Physiology or Medicine, 1993), Professor Harald zur Hausen (Physiology or Medicine, 2008), and Professor Kurt Wüthrich (Chemistry, 2002), Fields Medallist Professor Stephen Smale (1966) and Millennium Technology Prize winner Professor Michael Grätzel (2010).
Curiosity-driven research
For Dr. Roberts, starting the biotechnology company New England Biolabs (NEB) stemmed from practical rather than financial reasons. At the time, he found himself inundated with requests from other laboratories for the restriction enzymes he had been isolating from bacteria. (The enzymes, which cut DNA at highly specific locations, have numerous applications in laboratory research.) He set up the company to handle the distribution of the enzymes, and intended for its profits to go back towards funding more research, he said.
“I think you can get into this for many reasons. Most people get into it because they want to become rich and I think this is absolutely the wrong motivation… You should do it because you think it’s going to be useful to society in some way. In my case it enabled a biotech revolution, so I was very happy with that,” said Dr. Roberts, who is now NEB’s chief scientific officer.
Agreeing, Prof. Grätzel said that research should be “curiosity-driven, not money-driven.” For him, working with industry to commercialize his Millennium Technology Prize-winning dye-sensitized solar cell technology was a completely new experience.
“It opens up a new dimension that goes beyond what a scientist normally does,” he said.
The panel emphasized the importance of basic research as a source of ideas that can eventually be commercialized, even if their applications are not immediately obvious. Prof. Andersson pointed to NEB as an example of basic research into bacterial enzymes spawning an entire industry.
Prof. zur Hausen, whose discovery that human papilloma viruses cause cervical cancer enabled the development of a vaccine against the disease, said that he has always considered himself a basic researcher. When he first approached companies to persuade them to develop a vaccine, none was interested because their market research at the time had yielded far from encouraging results. Today, however, the cervical cancer vaccine market is worth millions of dollars.
The panel also felt that science and industry now share closer ties than ever before.
“Businesses themselves have become some of the pioneers of the new science,” said Prof. Smale, a mathematician who works on a diverse range of subjects such as protein folding, economics and learning theory, and who is also affiliated with the Toyota Technological Institute.
Prof. Wüthrich, who invented nuclear magnetic resonance, a technique that allows researchers to work out the structures of proteins, said that it used to be considered in bad taste to mix science with business.
“Things have changed very much today… a scientist, a professor aged 40 who has not started at least one spin-off company is considered to be suspicious,” he said, to laughter from the audience. “As a scientist I should collaborate with entrepreneurs and help entrepreneurs succeed.”
Start small, then make loftier goals
In response to a question from the audience about how best to handle the long process to commercialization and high failure rates of biotechnology companies, Dr. Roberts suggested that first-time entrepreneurs start with smaller ideas.
“Sometimes it’s good to think small when you first get started, and later on if you find yourself successful, then make some loftier goals because at that point you will have some success under your belt, and then you can get people to support you,” he said.
When asked for advice on juggling several roles at the same time – being a scientist, an entrepreneur and a parent, for example – the panel agreed that doing so is difficult, and suggested that scientists pick the role they feel they would perform best at. For example, one could be involved in starting up or advising a company, but leave its day-to-day running to others who are better suited to the role.
Turning problems into business ideas
Citing the example of next-generation sequencing, Dr. Roberts said that the rise of a new paradigm can spark off a proliferation of novel technologies, and suggested that would-be entrepreneurs look to such instances for commercialization opportunities.
“This idea of a new way of doing something often offers great opportunities for starting companies,” he said.
When an audience member suggested that some fields of research do not lend themselves well to commercialization, Dr. Roberts said that this was not always the case.
“My own feeling is that very often, when you’re doing your own research, if you run into problems and you think, well, how do you solve this problem? Is there some new technique or some new methodology that would help me to solve this problem? This gives you the basis right there and then for thinking about how could that be commercialized if you wanted to go that way,” he said.
The panel session titled “The Entrepreneur in the Scientist” was part of the Global Young Scientists Summit 2014, organized by the National Research Foundation of Singapore. The summit took place from January 19 to 24, 2014 at Nanyang Technological University.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine.
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