Financial Growing Pains of a Biotech
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hen Amir Belson, an Israeli pediatric surgeon, came to Stanford University in 1998 for a fellowship in pediatric nephrology, in his pocket he carried a creased piece of paper on which were scrawled, in tiny Hebrew writing, 64 ideas for tools that he thought could help clinicians do their jobs better. One of the entries on Belson's sheet of inventions was a "smart" endoscope that changed its shape continuously as it followed its tip - essentially, a snake-like device that avoids painful bumps against the body's inner walls by generating a map of the tip's path that the rest of the scope follows. "I was not a good endoscopist," he says. "I invented this technology to make colonoscopy much, much easier."
Naysayers told him that such shape-shifting "was against physics" and would never ...
