Excerpt from the companion book to 'Cracking the Code: Phil Sharp and the Biotech Revolution'
Paradigm-shifting work by Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and Gregor Mendel, sparked revolutionary work by Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and James Watson, which powered transformative insights from gifted scientists from Barbara McClintock, Fred Sanger, and Paul Berg to those of Wally Gilbert, David Baltimore, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. And the river flows on.
A storyteller could take his point of departure to explore the ongoing adventure to understand the nature, design and activating principles of life from any of these amazing folks – and gifted storytellers have. For the point of departure for my look at the astonishing impact of the life sciences revolution, I chose Phil Sharp.
As a young boy in the 1970s, roaming the shoreline and fields of the Benedictine monastery where I grew up, Jim Watson’s first-hand account of the discovery of the double helix captivated me – as Lincoln Barnett’s approachable look at Einstein’s early work and Feynman, Carson, Goodall, Sagan and Bronowski’s blend of storytelling prowess and scientific landscapes did.
But as a filmmaker, I wanted to explore how and when the life sciences revolution catalyzed the biotechnology revolution. This let me see how deep scientific insight led to the creation of life saving medicines for us all. This decision ultimately led me down a road to the very first biotech companies, and the folks who had the courage, naivete, grit and talent to both found them – and build them.
These visionaries’ parents were painters and engineers, factory workers and coal miners, liquor store owners, lawyers, teachers and farmers. If there are bonds of commonality to be discerned among them, they lie not in personal background or family standing but in a passion for discovery, a talent for collaboration, a commitment to hard work and the shimmering sparkle of imagination.
Those few who would straddle both the world of academic science and plunge into the churning waters of entrepreneurship to make their visions real, dreamed with their eyes open.
The folks I have been privileged to meet from this community – Wally Gilbert and Bob Swanson, David Baltimore and Jennifer Doudna, Bob Langer, Tyler Jacks, Melissa Moore, Rachel Meyers and Phil Sharp, doubtless have the usual catalogue of human weaknesses, but they are to a person a noble and deeply inspiring group. And, with countless of their colleagues, they have begun to reshape our lives and our world in powerful, life affirming ways.
Some of the effects of their talent are clear and easy to measure. 50 years ago, no one took a biotech derived medicine. Last year, 7.6 billion people did. 50 years ago, a dozen employees worked in biotech, and the field’s economic impact was negligible. Now, 4.7 million people work directly or indirectly in biotech, and its economic impact is well north of $2 trillion annually.
Some of the blessings of these scientific pioneers, while far less tangible, are equally beautiful.
Decades ago, I was fortunate enough to be taught sociobiology by Ed Wilson, quantum mechanics by Norman Ramsay and chemistry by Dudley Herschbach – and while Ed didn’t win a Nobel, Norman and Dudley had.
What sticks with me today aren’t the formulas I was shown or the homework I struggled to complete, it’s the gentle grace of each of them – a grace that never masked weakness of manner or mind, but represented a humble recognition that their voyage of discovery could never be complete, and the generous view that those of us who would become their friends or were their students had something we could contribute to the commonweal – just as they had.
Something in their journey of imagination, mind, and spirit gave them perspective to see us all as splashes of color in a firmament of scale beyond reckoning, and while their accomplishments outdistanced most, they were wise enough to realize that each of their discoveries pales in comparison to what remains unknown.
Years later, when I made Breakthrough, a film about the blessedly irreverent and gifted Nobel winning scientist Jim Allison, I was delighted to see that what I remembered from my youthful encounters with scientific minds of great impact, harmonized perfectly with what my more schooled self witnessed afresh.
The attitude I have long seen in these luminous scientists, bred of quietly self-possessed, determined and imaginative talent spliced to a passionate dedication to ideals far beyond self interest–represents the America of my childhood a bit better than the self-aggrandizing tech culture of today, blaring across headlines – and all too ready to be the face of American innovation.
But the potent dream to make something novel, and to use the tools of science and engineering to do it, captures minds far afield from Silicon Valley, and in industries that are little focused on likes and tweets.
Happily, in the folks whom I interviewed for 'Cracking the Code,' I universally found the powerful, gracious and uplifting spirit I experienced from my professors and friends of earlier days, enjoy in the scientists I collaborate with in my life as an entrepreneur, and discovered again as a filmmaker — first when I traveled the byways of cutting-edge biology with my harmonica-playing friend Jim, and now with the erstwhile basketball-playing Phil Sharp.
Phil’s remarkable journey takes him from a dirtfloored shack lacking electricity and running water in tobacco country Kentucky to the heights of life changing innovation, His path, inspired by and traveled with a coterie of scientists who have proven to be his boon companions, and always alongside his blessed and beloved wife Ann, showcases a character that reminds me of a cast of American I celebrate – and who some days seem rarer and rarer. Pragmatic, honorable, collaborative, maturely competitive, compassionate, good humored, open-minded, imaginative and persistent. Fundamentally generous. They are neither boastful about their majestic accomplishments nor intimidated by them, because either attitude is a distraction from a deep drive to penetrate mysteries that lie ahead, and the revelations and inventions that may follow.
The United States was built into a powerful nation by talented and determined folks, practical and self-reliant, able to work together and willing, on behalf of ideals more important than themselves, to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. It was built by folks like Phil Sharp.
For any community to be truly great, it must act and be willing to sacrifice on behalf of principles more elevating than self-interest. Life science pioneers like Phil Sharp have done this, and while I am focusing this work and the attendant film on him, I stand in gratitude and awe of each member of the founding crew of the life sciences revolution who have altered our ideas of life itself — and who serve as radiant examples of pioneering spirit in the biological and cultural DNA in each of us.
After all, a continent spanning river draws water afresh every day.
– Bill Haney, Director
Learn more about 'Cracking the Code: Phil Sharp and the Biotech Revolution' here.
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