It was the early 1990s, when biotechs and investors alike were placing big bets on the promise of data from the Human Genome Project. But George Scangos wasn't convinced. At the time, Scangos was working at pharmaceutical behemoth Bayer. He saw many pharmaceutical companies making large deals in genomics, and viewed them as potential mistakes. "I felt like what one got from those collaborations was a whole lot of data," which was only correlative, says Scangos. "What I thought was needed was more of a functional approach."
Scangos had completed his postdoc at Yale University generating transgenic mouse models, which gave him an appreciation for studying live systems. After a short stint at Johns Hopkins University, he joined a small biotech called Molecular Therapeutics. When the company was acquired by Bayer in 1986, Scangos stayed on and climbed the ranks within the company, ending up as the president of Bayer ...
