Arthur D. Levinson

3 results back to index

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

“I had no idea how you would start a company.”34 Boyer was a committed scientist—his Siamese cats were named Watson and Crick35—and his willingness even to consider commercial possibilities for his scientific work made him unusual in 1976. Most biologists at the time were suspicious of the corporate world. Arthur D. Levinson, who would eventually serve as CEO of Genentech and a director of both Apple and Google, recalls that as a young biochemist, if he wanted to speak to a company, he would use a pay phone down the street from his lab, rather than risk being overheard by his colleagues.36 Brook Byers says that a scientist thinking about business “was sort of like when Bob Dylan went electric in the sixties.

…

The man who at twenty-eight had wanted to change the world and had given himself the courage to do so by imagining his eighty-five-year-old self looking back at his life never made it to eighty-five. “One of the ironies here is he devoted so much of his life to applying this technology to generate medical breakthroughs, drugs that saved countless lives,” says Arthur D. Levinson, a former CEO of Genentech and director of Google and Apple, where he also chairs the board. “But unfortunately, his wasn’t one of them.”20 Genentech was the first company to produce a human protein by splicing a gene into bacteria, the first to produce a drug by genetic engineering, and the first biotechnology company to go public.21 It also set a new standard for the pharmaceutical industry when it allowed its scientists to publish papers on their research, rather than keeping it secret.

…

“Missing Computer Software,” BusinessWeek, Sept. 1, 1980, quoted in Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003): 2. 7. Gary Slutsker, “The New ‘Publishers’ in Computer Software,” Venture, September 1980: 79. 8. “Many of us had no idea what it meant to ‘go public.’ ” David V. Goeddel and Arthur D. Levinson, “Obituary: Robert A. Swanson (1947–99),” Nature 403 (Jan. 20, 2000): 264. 9. Burt McMurtry to author, Sept. 20, 2015. 10. Kurtzig, CEO: 187–8; McMurtry to author, Sept. 18, 2015. 11. Kurtzig, CEO: 188. 12. Betty Lehan Harragan, Games Mother Never Taught You: Corporate Gamesmanship for Women (Warner Books, 1978): 299, 310. 13.

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

Maybe, I thought, science didn’t have a clue after all, and we were all doomed to spend the final stages of our existence blathering around the assisted living facility checking our name tags to recall who we were, and not a thing to be done about it. Then came news. The announcement on September 18, 2013, of a corporation called Calico, funded largely by Google. “We’re tackling aging,” was the way the company put it, “one of life’s great mysteries.” Google? Now that was worth looking into. And just as intriguing was the news that Arthur D. Levinson had been asked to lead the company. Most people wouldn’t have known Levinson if they tripped over him, but he was a force in Silicon Valley. He was the chairman of Apple, and just a year earlier had chaired Genentech, two of Silicon Valley’s most storied early start-ups. When news of Calico hit the wires, the media snapped to.

…

That meant researchers could, at least theoretically, reorganize them in all sorts of absorbing ways to unlock the mysteries of the human genome—as well as the drugs that might improve their shortcomings. But it was one thing to have an idea, and another to make it a reality. And that was why Levinson was important. Truthfully, Maris hadn’t thought he had a chance in hell of getting to Arthur D. Levinson, chair of Apple Inc., and CEO and chair of Genentech, the world’s first biotechnology company. Blake Byers, a Google Ventures colleague and biomedical engineer, had told Maris that if anyone could build a company that could cure aging, Levinson was the guy. Byers knew this because his father, Brook, was one of the original founders of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (KPCB), arguably Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firm.

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

Inhibiting angiogenesis can interfere with the healing of surgical incisions and other wounds. Several months after the Orlando meeting, the Food and Drug Administration, weighing the risks and the benefits, revoked approval for Avastin as a treatment for metastatic breast cancer. Such grim realities seemed far away at the grand opening session, where Arthur D. Levinson, a pioneer in the design of targeted therapies, was honored for “leadership and extraordinary achievements in cancer research.” He was cited specifically for his role in developing “blockbuster drugs” like Avastin. Levinson is the chairman of Genentech, which also makes Herceptin to treat the 15 to 20 percent of breast cancers that are HER2 positive—those with an overabundance of the growth-stimulating receptors.

Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

“FTC Looks at Google-Apple Board Ties: Report,” Reuters (May 5, 2009), http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-apple-idUSTRE54403Z20090505. The FTC investigated, and both individuals resigned from Apple’s board; https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2009/08/statement-bureau -competition-director-richard-feinstein-regarding; “Statement of FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz Regarding the Announcement That Arthur D. Levinson Has Resigned from Google’s Board,” FTC Press Release (October 12, 2009), https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2009/10 /statement-ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-regarding-announcement. See Section 8 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. § 19(a)(5). 4. Companies with a complementary relationship may not interact directly.