LIFE FOR SALE: THE BIRTH OF LIFE SCIENCE COMPANIES - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 141

Swanson and Boyer funded Genentech originally by convincing Tom Perkins of the Kleiner Perkins
venture capital firm to turn on the money spigot. He started out with a few hundred dollars and ended up
investing millions. Venture capitalists line the famous Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. It is the
Wall Street of California, whose money guys have provided the jump-start for waves of technology, in-
cluding biotechnology and the dot-com revolution.
A key to the birth of this heavily financed industry is what Martin Kenney, a professor at University of
California-Davis, calls “the university-industrial complex,” a phenomenon that predates even Boyer. Bi-
otechnology was born in the labs of academia, but “the multimillion-dollar, multiyear contract between a
single university and a single company” became the engine that drove its growth. Indeed, the 1974 contract
between Harvard Medical School and Monsanto was one of the arrangements that became a model for the
university-corporate relationships that gave birth to biotechnology. 6
Ray Valentine, a university professor at Davis, followed in the footsteps of East Coast universities. In
1975, as a young professor in the Department of Agronomy and Range Science, he was the agricultural rep-
resentative to the meeting at Asilomar debating the future of biotechnology—the one that had so angered
Boyer. Valentine said it was a big step for a farmer to be with all those Nobel Prize winners. In his talk he
suggested that perhaps the new technology could be used for fixing nitrogen in plants and he immediately
saw the potential for commercializing the technology in agriculture. 7
In the late 1970s he wrote a paper proposing an institute to spin off commercial products from campus
research that drew a cool response from the university. But as a proponent of academic cooperation with
corporations, he procured a research grant from Allied Corporation for a research project for biological ni-
trogen fixation, and it gave Allied an exclusive, royalty-bearing license to any patents. This created quite a
stir at the university—which was already known for its ties to agribusiness. According to Kenney, “Shortly
after securing the Allied Corporation grant for UCD, Ray Valentine founded and became vice-president of
the first agricultural biotechnology firm, Calgene. Then one week after UCD secured the Allied Corpora-
tion grant, Allied purchased 20 percent of Calgene's stock for $2 million.” 8
Valentine had other supporters in high places. He spoke of how Nixon personally intervened in securing
a research grant that was in danger of lapsing, and that without the money for his lab, Calgene would never
have been born. He claimed that he had taken an oath not to speak of it until after Nixon's death. 9
Another opportunity arose when Valentine joined forces with Norman Goldfarb, who was looking to
quit his job at Intel and start his own company. Goldfarb's family had bankrolled companies ranging from
Genentech to Apple, and he had money to invest. After Calgene was established, Valentine kept his day job
at the university, but he also became vice president of research and founded a science advisory committee.
In the 1980s Calgene began the long process of working on genes for herbicide resistance—the research
that eventually led to the development of Monsanto's weed killer Roundup. Calgene was viewed by its
founders as a “force for revolutionary change” that would follow in the footsteps of Genentech and Apple,
according to one of the company's first scientists, Vic Knauf. Calgene had some big-time investors, in-
cluding Procter & Gamble and the French chemical giant Rhône-Poulenc. But what caught investors' ima-
ginations was a “discovery that would solve every vegetable shopper's pet peeve and turn Calgene into a
jolly green gene giant.” The idea was to make a better tomato—a flavorful one with an extended shelf life
that would also make good tomato paste. The science advisory committee at Calgene was not impressed
with the idea, which inspired Dave Stalker, a senior researcher at Calgene, to make the tomato his personal
cause. Campbell's Soup was convinced to fund the research. Calgene isolated the gene that makes toma-
toes soft and decided to construct another gene to keep the first gene from doing its job. 10 Amazingly, it

worked.
After years of research and development the tomatoes went on the market in 1994, three days before
receiving approval from the FDA. The first genetically modified food approved for humans, they were