‍

“Each generation needs a new music,” Francis Crick wrote in 1988, reflecting back on his landmark discovery. Crick was 35, then, in 1953, when he began working with a 23-year-old named James Watson, and 37 when the pair unveiled the double helix. Rosalind Franklin, whose diffraction work undergirded their metal model, was 32.

‍

The model would become the score for a new era in biology, one devoted to cracking the basic structures turning inside life. Subsequent years would bring new conductors and new rhythms: Robert Swanson, 29 when he convinced a 39-year-old Herb Boyer to build a company off his work and call it Genentech; Phillip Sharp, 29 when he discovered RNA splicing and 34 when he co-founded Biogen; Frances Arnold, 36 when she pioneered directed evolution; Feng Zhang, 31 when he published his CRISPR paper.

‍

You can think of the list below as a playlist of 20 songs. We’ve brought you 20 researchers and executives thinking through ideas that may succeed or sputter, but will certainly help define the soundtrack for the next 20 years of biopharma: computer scientists cracking gene networks and designing biological search engines, venture capitalists burrowing research pipelines into universities, and microbiologists creating antibiotics ‘crapsules’ from feces.

‍

We hope you’ll take a listen. — Jason Mast

‍

Continue reading...

‍

Skyhawk Contact
Maura McCarthy
Head of Corporate Development
maura@skyhawktx.com