One of things that has riled Ellison is the perception, stimulated by speculative newspaper articles, that the real purpose of the EMF is to give its benefactor early access to treatments that will extend his own life. A typical example appeared recently in the San Jose Mercury News. It suggested that because Ellison was known for reacting badly to the death of loved ones, appeared in good shape for his age, and was an active sportsman, it followed that he was pouring his billions into seeking the “fountain of youth.” The piece even managed to chuck in a reference to the age discrimination case brought against Oracle by Randy Baker as further evidence that Ellison had a horror of old age.
Ellison says, “Our medical foundation has marshaled so many magnificent minds and committed hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to better understand the fundamental biology underlying the diseases of aging, and somehow the San Jose Mercury found a way to write a negative story about it. I think that says a lot more about the Mercury than my medical foundation.” He does, however, agree that humanitarian issues as well as economic ones are at stake and that his own experiences have affected him: “Diseases of aging—and I consider many cancers to be diseases of aging—hit hard at most of our families. My mother died of leukemia. My brother-in-law got Parkinson’s. It was awful to watch his body tremble and the personality I knew so well just slowly disappear.” Lederberg simply observes that the time scale involved in bringing primary research from the lab even to the product-testing stage is unlikely to be of much personal benefit to someone of Ellison’s age.
If there is a criticism, it is that the diseases that the EMF is focused on are predominantly those of the rich. In poor countries with lower life expectancy, they are simply far less prevalent than other killers. Lederberg and Ellison answer the question in different ways. Lederberg argues that once people in the Third World have surmounted the perils of early childhood, and assuming they don’t fall victim to violence or AIDS, life expectancy is not as different as the statistics suggest: “This is something that’s shared by the whole of mankind, not just the rich.” Ellison points out that one of the results of lavishing expensive care on an aging population that votes is that there’s less money available for programs for the poor. In the intensifying competition for resources, the education of inner-city children drops to the bottom of the list.
That said, the Ellison Medical Foundation has now added research into infectious diseases of the Third World to its dossier. One of Lederberg’s preoccupations is that too many treatments for many diseases, above all AIDS, are simply too expensive for people in poor countries and that drug companies are unwilling to invest in those markets. “Because the people are too poor to buy the medicine, you have to find another approach—it’s not intrinsically necessary that a treatment for HIV has to cost $10,000 a year. We should be making long-term gambles in the direction of producing treatments for tuberculosis and malaria and so on that are, above all, affordable.”
One thing that may have held the EMF back a little is the relative lack of publicity it has received because of Ellison’s uncharacteristic decision not to brag about the work it is funding until something concrete has been achieved—an approach he contrasts with the publicity machine that broadcasts the beneficence of the Gates foundation. But as word has gotten out, so has the number of research projects, now running into hundreds each year, being submitted for sponsorship to Lederberg, Richard Sprott (the former director of the Biology of Aging program at the National Institute of Aging, who was hired to run the foundation), and its superdistinguished Science Advisory Board (SAB). For Lederberg, the only disappointment has been the difficulty of getting Ellison involved in a more hands-on role. Lederberg says, “I’ve tried very hard to get Larry to engage in SAB meetings, but his time commitments have made it impossible.”6 Although Ellison has talked about making up to $2 billion available over time, you sense that Lederberg would be more confident about the future if Ellison were just a little more engaged. “We’ll have other options to present to him [to add to aging and infectious diseases] in a couple of years. But these are all open questions. If I could count on his interest in doubling the foundation every three or four years, Larry will become the country’s major philanthropist in the biomedical area.” Ellison says simply that if Lederberg believes that there are projects that should be funded, they will be.
Two other schemes may compete with the medical foundation for resources. The first is a $100 million project to found a school to study the impact of technology on politics and economics. Ellison would like to see the PET (Politics, Economics, Technology) school investigate the interactions between technologically extended life expectancy, social security spending, and the competition between social groups for scarce public-sector resources. Ellison has approached Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, but he has discovered that trying to do anything genuinely interdisciplinary is hellishly difficult at institutions that aren’t set up to run that way. One possibility is to make it a freestanding institution, but it currently seems more likely that if the PET school happens at all, it will be on a much more modest scale than originally contemplated.7
The second idea, a research university focused on biology, which has Lederberg’s fingerprints all over it, reflects some of Ellison’s suspicion of conventional academic institutions. Ellison believes that one of the major problems in getting potentially lifesaving ideas to market is the squabbling between researchers and their sponsoring universities when there is money to be made from the exploitation of a patent.
Ellison says, “Within a traditional university there’s a lot of ambiguity about the ownership of intellectual property. Who owns the patent: the researcher or the university? Who gets the royalties? So I’m thinking of starting a research university that enables scientists to pursue their ideas, patent them, and even create companies on the outside to commercialize their ideas, if that’s what they want to do. I want to break down the remaining walls between university research departments and commercial biotechnology companies. Hopefully that will allow new drugs to come to market more quickly. Lives will be saved, and fortunes will be made. Patients will get healthy, and professors will get rich. A perfect marriage of humanitarian ideals and market incentives: human nature at its very best.”
What Ellison is now thinking of is something like a “Rockefeller West”—something akin to the university in New York that Lederberg used to run but based in or around San Francisco and dedicated to biotech research. Combining a standard 80/20 “no-haggle” split of royalties8 between researchers and the school with Silicon Valley’s genius for encouraging entrepreneurs and its established infrastructure for bringing new businesses into existence seems to him the best way to ensure that the crossover from lab to market would happen faster there than anywhere else. Ellison quips, “The medical foundation and the research university will get ninety-five percent of what I earn in my lifetime. I don’t think they’ll have any problems spending it, either.” They’ll also get most of his time. He says, “Once I’ve completed the earning portion of my life, I’ll have the time to get deeply involved in the operation of both of these institutions. That should begin to happen three to five years from now as I start to disengage from Oracle.”
His impatience with academia and his own ambivalence toward the philanthropic ethic may also help explain why Ellison talks about Quark Biotech Inc. (QBI) with greater excitement than he does about his medical foundation despite “the dazzling work” being done there. Although it is incorporated in California, QBI is an Israeli company, and Ellison, although not a practicing Jew, has something of a love affair with Israel, admiring its steely pragmatism, respect for intellect, and ingrained entrepreneurialism. Having owned 70 percent of the company since 1996, representing an investment of about $100 million, he feels even more responsible for it than for the medical foundation. Finally, the fact that QBI is working on drugs that have the potential to produce dramatic improvements in cancer treatment provides a different order of excitem
ent for Ellison.
And while Quark’s long-term projections are daunting for ordinary investors and the odds against hitting the jackpot are long, the possibility that Quark could win big only adds spice to the game. Ellison doesn’t disagree but adds, “The time frame is pretty long at QBI [because the whole drug approval process is such a drawn-out business], but they’ll deliver lifesaving drugs sooner than the research being done by the medical foundation. That’s why I’m so excited about QBI. If I judge myself on the number of lives saved, most likely they’ll be the first to deliver. I guess it’s just another example of my own impatience and immaturity.
“QBI is developing both therapeutic drugs and diagnostic tests. One test screens a patient’s DNA to see if that person is especially sensitive to radiation. There’s a small percentage of the population that should not be exposed to radiation of any type—not even dental X rays. Unfortunately, there’s no simple test to identify these people. So QBI is developing one. Well, if you can identify people who should avoid radiation, you should also be able to identify people who should avoid taking a particular drug that would be harmful to them. It turns out that there are numerous drugs that have been proven to be very effective at treating a disease, but the drug fails the clinical trial because it’s toxic to some people. Now, by looking at the DNA and the clinical outcomes of everyone who took the drug—it cured you, it killed you, it did nothing—we should be able to identify the people this drug is likely help and screen out the people the drug is likely to hurt. It’s called drug personalization. It’s sort of like how Amazon.com can look at all the books you’ve previously read to recommend a new one for you—except we look at your genes and recommend the right drug for you. It’s a monumental breakthrough because it enables not just one new treatment but thousands of new treatments that previously failed their clinical trials.”
Another technology, known as the PFT (Pifithrin) Compound, being pioneered by QBI, is designed to make existing cancer treatments exponentially more effective while reducing their damaging side effects. Ellison says, “The most common forms of cancer therapy are radiation and chemotherapy. Unfortunately, when you use either one of these to kill cancer cells, there is a tremendous amount of collateral damage to healthy cells. That is, large numbers of healthy cells die along with the targeted cancer cells. It’s the death of these healthy cells that causes the terrible ‘side effects’ that accompany most forms of cancer therapy. The healthy cells die because the radiation or chemotherapy damages their DNA, which in turn causes the cell to ‘commit suicide’ through a process called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. When healthy cells detect that they have DNA damage, they increase the production of their p53 gene. The p53 gene is the primary molecular mechanism that induces programmed cell death in normal, healthy cells. Interestingly, the p53 gene is ‘broken’ in most cancer cells, so cancer cells will not commit suicide. That makes cancer therapy very difficult. Cancer cells are much harder to kill than healthy cells, because healthy cells have a working suicide mechanism and cancer cells don’t.
“QBI solved this problem by developing a drug that turns off the p53 gene in all cells for a few hours during and after radiation or chemotherapy. That eliminates most of the collateral damage to healthy cells, thus eliminating most of the side effects. Even better, this enables the physician to go after the cancer more aggressively by increasing the dosage of radiation and chemotherapy without damaging too many healthy cells. We’ve tested up to ten times the lethal dosage of radiation with minimum ill effects on healthy cells. So the Quark compound flips off the p53 gene for a couple of hours and death takes a holiday. It’s a very big deal.”
A big deal indeed, but unfortunately Quark has itself fallen foul of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) approval process with PFT. Ellison admits that QBI wasn’t sufficiently rigorous in its preclinical trials, with the result that almost two years may have been lost, but he’s perplexed by an approval process that is so ultracautious that it can allow many people to die by denying them a new wonder drug because a handful of patients may suffer an adverse reaction. “The FDA and our legal system work hand-in-hand to virtually eliminate errors of commission; unfortunately, this leads to a dramatic increase in errors of omission. Here’s why: If a drug saves a thousand lives for every one person it kills, the drug is not likely to be approved. You can’t get sued for not releasing a drug that would have saved a thousand people; you can and will get sued for releasing a drug that killed one person. It’s pretty bad math and worse ethics, if you ask me.”
Quark may have fewer than 300 people on its payroll, but about 130 of its employees have a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology, gene discovery, signal transduction, pathology, chemistry, or medicinal chemistry. In addition, it employs more than 50 specialists in DNA and protein analysis, algorithm development, programming, and statistics in what it calls its Bioinformatics Group. Lederberg, who sits on the board, says, “They’re brilliant. That’s the only word to describe them. Whether QBI will add up to a single coherent business is a little less obvious to me. But some of the things they’re working on could turn out to be real blockbusters.”
Ellison has constantly reiterated that biomedicine will be his second career. It’s consistent with his belief that the computer industry is maturing and consolidating; that the great platform shifts that required technology visionaries are now, thanks to the Internet, a thing of the past; that the few surviving computer companies (including Oracle) will increasingly take on the character of business utilities. In short, Ellison thinks that biotech not only is the area that will best leverage his money for the good of mankind—although he’d never put it quite so portentously—but is also where he’s likely to get the most intellectual stimulation and the most fun.
Don Lucas, who knows as well as anyone what makes Ellison tick, hopes more than anything that he won’t leave it too late. Until his philanthropic interests absorb more of his time, he says, Ellison will never understand just how much pleasure and sense of worth they can give him. Jobs says something similar, albeit from the perspective of a younger man. He says, “My sense of it is that he’s not quite ready for the next stage of his life. I don’t think Oracle allows him enough time for much of anything but his family and a little bit for himself. This is a hobby now, but it’s not yet a passion. However, I think it will become a passion in coming years that will be both fun and tremendously fulfilling for him.”
• • •
Besides biotech and finding interesting ways to apply his wealth for the public good, Ellison is dabbling with the idea of going into politics. At a time when high-profile CEOs are not exactly topping the “Who do you most admire?” polls and when the memory of Oracle’s wounding spat with the State of California is only just beginning to fade, it seems like a pretty crazy notion. And with the possible exception of Michael Bloomberg in New York—though the jury is still out on him—successful businessmen rarely make good politicians. They tend to share an autocratic style, a dislike of compromise, and a desire to quantify and analyze problems and set goals that they expect to be met. Most CEOs are also pretty useless when it comes to the arts of schmoozing and small talk that lubricate political wheels and flatter voters. Given that most of the above applies to Ellison in spades and is compounded by his hatred of pompous authority and determination never to do anything he doesn’t want to, one might ask if he’s taken leave of his senses.
It’s partly Ellison’s curiosity and constant challenge seeking, partly vanity—he has to believe that he would do a better job than some of the office-clinging nonentities with whom he is forced to do business—and partly idealism. He is genuinely passionate about improving the low standards in America’s public schools and applying information technology to solve some of their problems (Oracle has given away thousands of network computers, and Ellison is thinking of using his own money to put expensive textbooks online).
His close friend Tom Lantos, the human-rights-campaigning Californ
ia congressman, has urged him to make a run for the Senate. But Ellison admits, “I think I’d be a terrible freshman senator. I’m too impatient and uncompromising.”
What does appeal to him is taking a pop at becoming governor of California. Since his bruising encounter with Governor Gray Davis—“the master of expediency”—over the alleged misselling of database licenses (see Chapter 25), the idea of running in 2006 as an independent has become even more interesting; one thing that Ellison would not have to worry about is money to fight an effective campaign. And it’s probably as much the idea of the campaign that attracts him as the possibility of winning. As Joshua Lederberg said to him, “So you win. It’s the day after that your problems begin.”
So what exactly are Ellison’s politics? He says that politics were always talked about at home. His adopted father, Lou, once ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature (Ellison thinks, but doesn’t seem totally sure), while his brother-in-law, David Linn, was politically active and served on the Illinois Constitutional Convention. Ellison says, “In my family, you were either a liberal Democrat or a very liberal Democrat. Those were the only two political ideologies represented around our dinner table.” In what he describes as the “Jewish ghetto” in Chicago where he was raised, the politics of the Ellisons and Linns were fairly typical. The big issue during Ellison’s teen years was civil rights, which, naturally enough, everyone he knew was passionate about.
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