Category: Entrepreneurship

Choppin at Hughes Medical Institute Hired Good Scientists and Let Them Pursue Hunches and Serendipitous Insights

(p. A27) Purnell Choppin, whose research on how viruses multiply helped lay the foundation for today’s fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, died on July 3 [2021] at his home in Washington, one day shy of his 92nd birthday.

. . .

Dr. Choppin (pronounced show-PAN) focused on measles and influenza, but his research, and the methods he developed to conduct it, proved critical for later work on other viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the virus behind the Covid-19 pandemic, said David Baltimore, an emeritus professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology and a winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

“The issue of how viruses infect cells was very much on his mind, and the mechanisms he worked out studying influenza were central to thinking about coronaviruses,” Dr. Baltimore said. “Thanks to his work and that of so many others, when the pandemic hit, we were able to formulate questions about the virus in quite precise terms.”

Dr. Choppin was equally well known as an administrator, first at Rockefeller and then at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which hired him in 1985 as its chief medical officer. He later ran the institute for 12 years, turning it from a modest-size research organization into a global research powerhouse.

. . .

With a calm, easygoing demeanor that disguised a fierce, visionary ambition, Dr. Choppin took an innovative approach to funding. Unlike other institutions, which provide grants for specific projects, he focused on identifying top researchers and then showering them with money and resources. Even better, he did not ask them to move to the institute, in Chevy Chase, Md. — they could stay where they were and let the Hughes largesse come to them.

. . .

While Dr. Choppin was sometimes criticized for making safe bets on established scientists who probably didn’t need his help, he made no apologies, and had the track record to prove the soundness of his approach: Dozens of Hughes researchers had gone on to become members of the National Academy of Sciences, and six won the Nobel Prize.

“We bet on people who look like they are going to be winners,” he told The Washington Post in 1988. “You look for originality. How they pick a problem and stick to it. Their instinct for the scientific jugular.”

For the full obituary, see:

Clay Risen. “Purnell Choppin, 91, Researcher Who Focused on Viruses.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, July 25, 2021): 27.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 23, 2021, and has the title “Purnell Choppin, 91, Dies; Researcher Laid Groundwork for Pandemic Fight.”)

Scientist Phillippy Co-Led DNA Completion Because Gaps “Were Just Really Bugging Me”

People with different ways of thinking are better at doing different kinds of work. For instance those who are obsessive/compulsive or have some types of Asperger’s, may be better at careful detailed work that requires perfectionism. (I do not know anything about Phillippy beyond the article quoted below, so I am in no way suggesting that he is an examplar of either of these ways of thinking.)

(p. A10) Two decades after the draft sequence of the human genome was unveiled to great fanfare, a team of 99 scientists has finally deciphered the entire thing. They have filled in vast gaps and corrected a long list of errors in previous versions, giving us a new view of our DNA.

. . .

In 2019, two scientists — Adam Phillippy, a computational biologist at the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Karen Miga, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz — founded the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium to complete the genome.

Dr. Phillippy admitted that part of his motivation for such an audacious project was that the missing gaps annoyed him. “They were just really bugging me,” he said. “You take a beautiful landscape puzzle, pull out a hundred pieces, and look at it — that’s very bothersome to a perfectionist.”

Dr. Phillippy and Dr. Miga put out a call for scientists to join them to finish the puzzle. They ended up with 99 scientists working directly on sequencing the human genome, and dozens more pitching in to make sense of the data. The researchers worked remotely through the pandemic, coordinating their efforts over Slack, a messaging app.

. . .

Dr. Altemose plans on using the complete genome to explore a particularly mysterious region in each chromosome known as the centromere. Instead of storing genes, centromeres anchor proteins that move chromosomes around a cell as it divides. The centromere region contains thousands of repeated segments of DNA.

In their first look, Dr. Altemose and his colleagues were struck by how different centromere regions can be from one person to another. That observation suggests that centromeres have been evolving rapidly, as mutations insert new pieces of repeating DNA into the regions or cut other pieces out.

While some of this repeating DNA may play a role in pulling chromosomes apart, the researchers have also found new segments — some of them millions of bases long — that don’t appear to be involved. “We don’t know what they’re doing,” Dr. Altemose said.

But now that the empty zones of the genome are filled in, Dr. Altemose and his colleagues can study them up close. “I’m really excited moving forward to see all the things we can discover,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Carl Zimmer. “Scientists Have Finally Filled in All the Gaps in the Human Genome.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 24, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 26, 2021, and has the title “Scientists Finish the Human Genome at Last.”)

Entrepreneurs Hold “Business Showers” for Their Startups

(p. B1) Sid Singh, 36, was joking recently with a friend that everyone he knew seemed to be having their third baby while he was bringing something entirely different into the world. He had just quit his consulting job to build a financial coaching company. It dawned on him that he could have a baby shower for his new endeavor.

. . .

Across the United States, especially in New York City, entrepreneurs are appropriating the baby shower, an event previously reserved for expectant parents, usually mothers. The idea is that if building a business is just as compre-(p. B5)hensive (and expensive!) as having a baby, why not build in the same kind of communal support?

. . .

“I remember when I first started telling people I was pregnant, I had never been congratulated like this for anything in my life,” she said. “I know people were coming from a place of love and excitement, but for me, launching the business was that for me.”

. . .

Mr. Singh received some confused responses. “Some people thought I was hosting a baby shower for someone,” he said. “Others thought I was having a baby with someone.”

He laughed it off, but he did explain to his friends why he was doing this. “People need to understand I am basically committing my entire life to this,” he said. “I am taking the biggest risk I can.”

For the full story, see:

Alyson Krueger. “Congratulations! It’s a Start-Up.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 24, 2021): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 19, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Jon Stewart’s Solyndra Riff Skewered Industrial Policy

Remember Solyndra? Apparently too few do. Today’s WSJ reports how the U.S. is imitating China’s “industrial policy” of subsidizing favored firms in favored industries such as green energy and semiconductors. To remind us that Larry Summers was right when he wrote that “government is a crappy venture capitalist,” I link above to Jon Stewart’s wise and funny send-up of the Solyndra debacle, first broadcast almost 10 years ago, on September 15, 2011.

The WSJ article mentioned above, is:

Ip, Greg. “West Dusts Off an Old Idea to Compete with China.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 30, 2021): A1 & A7.

Omaha’s “Boutique” Quarantine Unit Looked Backward to Ebola, Not Forward to Covid-19

(p. C1) Quarantine can be lifesaving; it can also be dangerous, an exercise of extraordinary power in the name of disease control, a presumption of guilt instead of innocence.

In “Until Proven Safe,” a new book about quarantine’s past and future, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley do an impressively judicious job of explaining exactly why fears of quarantine are understandable and historically justified, . . .

. . .

(p. C6) What becomes clear in “Until Proven Safe” is that it’s a lot easier to tell someone else to just shut up and submit to quarantine than to do it yourself. Any exercise of such formidable power also opens up the possibility of abuse. The book includes historical examples of disease control measures getting mapped onto existing prejudices. In 1900, a cordon sanitaire in San Francisco’s Chinatown zigzagged around white-owned businesses; . . .

. . .

Quarantine infrastructures tend to be tailored to the previous epidemic, instead of anticipating whatever is to come. A shiny new federal quarantine facility in Omaha — the first constructed in the United States in more than a century — was finished in January 2020, just in time to receive 15 American passengers from the coronavirus-infested Diamond Princess cruise ship. This National Quarantine Unit has a grand total of 20 beds. It offers a “boutique experience” ideally suited to managing one or two patients at a time after they have had potential exposure to, say, Ebola. The facility can’t do much to help contain a raging pandemic. As Manaugh and Twilley point out, the first American evacuation flight out of Wuhan alone carried 195 passengers.

For the full review, see:

Jennifer Szalai. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; You Can’t Leave Unless We Say So.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 27, 2021): C1 & C6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 26, 2021, and has the title “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Extraordinary History (and Likely Busy Future) of Quarantine.”)

The book under review is:

Twilley, Nicola, and Geoff Manaugh. Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021.

Elon Musk Says He Prefers Being an Engineer to Being Boss of Tesla

If Musk really prefers being an engineer, why doesn’t he resign as CEO and take a job as an engineer? Maybe like many entrepreneurs, he complains, but in his heart he prefers being an entrepreneur?

(p. B3) WILMINGTON, Del.—Elon Musk said Tesla bought SolarCity Corp. for one fundamental reason: to become more than a car company.

The Tesla Inc. chief executive made the argument as he wrapped up two days of sometimes feisty testimony in court, defending the roughly $2.1 billion tie-up completed in 2016 at a time both Tesla and SolarCity were financially struggling.

. . .

Though the grilling focused largely on what information Tesla shareholders were given about the financial condition of SolarCity, Mr. Musk at times veered farther afield in answering, particularly when it came to whether he exerted too much control over the purchase, a key question in the trial.

On Monday he said that he didn’t enjoy being the boss of Tesla. “I rather hate it, and I would much prefer to spend my time on design and engineering, which is what intrinsically I like doing,” he said.

When Mr. Baron on Tuesday asked Mr. Musk whether he had lied about when a core SolarCity product would be ready to sell in large volume, he responded, “I have a habit of being optimistic.” Mr. Baron fired back: “This is more than optimistic. This is just plain out false.”

For the full story, see:

Dave Michaels and Rebecca Elliott. “Musk Says Deal Helped Diversify.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 14, 2021): B3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 13, 2021, and has the title “Elon Musk Defends SolarCity Deal: ‘The Goal Is Not to Be a Car Company’.”)

SAS Entrepreneurs Forgo Billions in Order to Maintain Firm’s Tightknit Culture

Profits provide valuable information about whether a firm is doing something that consumers like, at a price they are willing to pay. But I think it is OK for a firm’s owners to seek less profits in return for more of some other values. Though personally, I would not forgo billions in order to preserve a yoga studio and a disc golf course.

(p. B1) Talks for Broadcom Inc. to buy SAS Institute Inc. have ended after the founders of the closely held software company changed their minds about a sale, people familiar with the matter said.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the companies were discussing a deal that would value SAS in the range of $15 billion to $20 billion, including any debt. Following the report, Jim Goodnight and John Sall, who co-founded SAS decades ago and still run the company, had a change of heart and decided not to sell to Broadcom, the people said. Whether another suitor for SAS could emerge isn’t clear.

Some SAS employees saw the company as a strange fit for efficiency-focused Broadcom, some of the people familiar with the matter said. SAS is known for a tightknit culture and has a sprawling North Carolina campus with amenities including a yoga studio and a disc golf course.

For the full story, see:

Cara Lombardo. “SAS Calls Off Broadcom Talks.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 14, 2021): B1.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 13, 2021, and has the title “Broadcom No Longer in Talks to Buy SAS.” The words “and a disc golf course” appear in the online version, but not in the print version.)

India’s Tata “Paid a Harsh Price” for Keeping Distance from Government

(p. A15) Mr. Raianu, a historian at the University of Maryland, is guilty of no hype when he titles his book “Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism.”

. . .

No other company has dominated the history of its national commerce and industry quite as much as the house of Tata in India, where it is one of the few major businesses still regarded as unstained by overt corruption. Although family-run for most of its existence—the stubborn Indian norm for merchants—the Tata company was from an early date “unusual” among India’s corporate groups (Mr. Raianu says) in employing professional executives and “talented nonrelatives.” The company also “kept its distance from the state” in both colonial and postcolonial times. It gave only lukewarm support to the Indian National Congress, which meant that the Tatas had few political chips to cash when the Congress party came to govern a free India. It paid a harsh price for this aloofness when Air India—the Tatas’ thriving aviation arm—was nationalized by Prime Minister Nehru in 1953.

. . .

The Parsi character of the company has, in many ways, helped it to transcend the mud pit of Indian business. The Parsis are a minuscule community, numbering around 57,000 Indians today. Practitioners of Zoroastrianism, they fled to India in the eighth century when Persia came under the sway of Islam. They embraced Western ways more readily than other Indians and, as a result, thrived under the British. Parsis, writes Mr. Raianu, “typified the religious minority exempt from ritual restrictions of caste and guild systems, much like European Jews.” And so they were more ready to look outward—to foreign opportunities—than the hidebound Indian business castes.

For the full review, see:

Tunku Varadarajan. “BOOKSHELF; From Homestead to Hegemony.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 14, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 13, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Tata’ Review: From Homestead to Hegemony.”)

The book under review is:

Raianu, Mircea. Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.

Chinese Communists Arrest Many Uyghur Muslim Entrepreneurs

(p. A7) In the summer of 2018, Sadir Eli, a Uyghur businessman, was in high spirits. His real-estate firm was pulling in strong profits, and he told his daughter he would buy a house for her in Massachusetts.

Then, Mr. Eli was accused of being a separatist and disappeared into the black box of China’s prison system in the northwest Xinjiang region.

“He did not engage in politics,” said Maria Mohammad, who last heard from her husband in June 2018, shortly before he was detained. Instead, she believes, Mr. Eli was targeted in part because he was a rich businessman, giving him influence that the authorities viewed as a threat.

The Xinjiang government didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Eli’s fate brings to life an overlooked element of China’s suppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang: the arrests of elite Uyghur business owners whose wealth and commercial interests enabled them to act as a bridge between Chinese authorities and Uyghur civil society. Some scholars saw them as helping narrow the economic gap between China’s Han majority and Xinjiang’s mostly Muslim ethnic minorities—a disparity that has fueled tensions in the strategically vital but fractious northwestern region.

The predecessor of Chinese leader Xi Jinping had envisioned economic development as the “foundation to solving all problems” in Xinjiang, a view more or less held by Beijing for more than a decade. But under Mr. Xi’s drive for national unity and assimilation, Chinese authorities have changed tack, making security and social control the region’s top priorities.

. . .

Nearly one-fifth of 4,572 people tracked in a database of individuals who have disappeared into Xinjiang’s internment camps and prisons made their livings in private business, according to nonprofit Uyghur Hjelp. The research and advocacy group, which shared its data with The Wall Street Journal, compiled the information through interviews with relatives and friends.

For the full story, see:

Eva Xiao. “Crackdown Hits Uyghur Entrepreneurs.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 14, 2021): A7.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 13, 2021, and has the title “China Locks Up Uyghur Businessmen; ‘In Their Eyes, We Are All Guilty’.”)

California Regulators Banned Angela Marsden’s Customers from Eating Outside, but Allowed Next Door “Essential” TV Comedy Workers to Eat Outside


The news report above was posted to YouTube by ABC channel 7 in Los Angeles on Dec. 5, 2020.

(p. 4) For more than a week, tensions have flared between Los Angeles restaurant owners and politicians over the county’s ban on outdoor dining, which health officials say is necessary to slow the surging pandemic — and restaurateurs say is destroying their livelihoods.

The controversy came to a head on Saturday when a restaurant owner shared a video on social media showing tents, tables and chairs set up as a catering station for a film crew — just feet away from her eatery’s similar outdoor dining space, which has sat empty since the restriction went into effect late last month.

“Tell me that this is dangerous, but right next to me — as a slap in my face — that’s safe?” Angela Marsden, who owns the restaurant, Pineapple Hill Saloon & Grill, said as the video panned from her outdoor dining space to the film crew’s catering site.

Ms. Marsden had already organized a protest against the outdoor dining ban before discovering the film tents. On Saturday, she and others gathered outside County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl’s house, saying the government’s uneven application of the rules was crushing small businesses.

. . .

The catering site was for a crew filming “Good Girls,” a comedy television show that airs on NBC, according to Philip Sokoloski, a spokesman for FilmLA, which helps Los Angeles manage film permits. Mr. Sokoloski said the catering site and the film location nearby were both authorized under a permit issued by the city.

. . .

California has declared entertainment industry workers essential, and in Los Angeles County they must follow strict guidelines such as eating in staggered shifts or in an area large enough to stay six feet apart.

Ms. Marsden said in an interview that she saw two people eating without masks at the tables when she went to her restaurant on Friday to pick up paychecks for her employees and supplies for the protest.

. . .

She said she had worked hard to make her outdoor patio compliant with the previous guidelines for outdoor dining before it, too, was banned.

“You name it, we did it,” she said.

For the full story, see:

Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs. “Restaurant Owners See Cruel Disparity in Los Angeles’s Outdoor Dining Ban.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 6, 2020): 4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 4, 2021 [sic], and has the title “She Couldn’t Open for Outdoor Dining. The Film Crew Next Door Could.”)

Entrepreneurs Can Solve Problems Outside of Silicon Valley

(p. A15) Zionsville, Ind., a town of about 30,000, is a few hours south of Flint, Mich., by car. So when evidence emerged in 2014 that Flint’s water supply was dangerously contaminated, a Zionsville business executive, Megan Glover, began looking into ways to test the water coming from her own family’s tap. What she uncovered surprised her—not that the local supply was contaminated, but that a testing kit typically cost $3,000, an exorbitant amount most families in her neighborhood would never consider. So Ms. Glover did the most American thing possible: She researched the issue, developed a more affordable alternative, founded a company, sought out investors (my venture firm among them) and emerged as CEO of 120Water, a successful enterprise that now helps monitor the quality of the nation’s water supply. (Zionsville’s water turned out to be clean.)

The basic arc of Ms. Glover’s story—identifying a pain point, then creating a venture to provide a solution—is common in the nation’s premier tech hubs. That is largely because the talent and capital required to build a successful venture are widely available to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston.

What makes Ms. Glover’s story remarkable is that she, like a burgeoning community of other tech entrepreneurs around the country, managed to build a successful venture without those ready-made advantages.

. . .

Entrepreneurs are innately curious, looking to bump into ideas and people that can unearth problems to solve and opportunities to seize. But founders are unlikely to stumble into problems in sectors to which they have no exposure. And that is why the geographic diffusion of tech will change the industry at its very core. It is much harder to understand what bedevils the lives of people living in, say, Fayetteville, Ark., if your life rarely exposes you to people living outside the social and commercial networks of places like San Francisco or Cambridge, Mass.

For the full commentary, see:

Steve Case. “Innovation Moves to Middle America.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 14, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 13, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)