Six years ago, Rosalynn Gill-Garrison and her colleagues sought to launch Sciona, a small biotech company now based in Boulder, Colo. Because they planned to sell genetic-based health and nutritional information to consumers, they knew that ethical concerns would be crucial. "There wasn't a model for giving this type of information to the public. We knew we had to run the business in the most responsible and ethical manner as we could," says Gill-Garrison, chief science officer.
Sciona, perhaps needing to be more sensitive to these issues than most biotech start-ups, ended up hiring an outside ethics consultant and made the ethics of handling genetic information a core element of its business plan. "Every venture capitalist we pitched to questioned our response to ethical issues," Gill-?Garrison says. "It was critical in their minds and invaluable to us as part of our identity."
Today, Sciona is one of hundreds of biotech, ...
