Word: genentech
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Such was the speculative fever when an obscure company named Genentech came to the over-the-counter market with a $36 million stock offering last fall. Veteran traders had never seen such commotion over an embryonic company, which had only 140 employees, sold no product to the public and showed a profit for just one year, at a rate of 2¢ per share. In fact, Genentech is only one of a growing number of similar companies just coming into existence that offer little more than vague promises of scientific things to come...
Three years later, Boyer joined with a young entrepreneur named Robert Swanson, then 28, to exploit this amazing-and, in some eyes, dangerous-new technology. Only lately has their firm, Genentech Inc.. begun to turn a profit. But its prototype bacterial factories have been extremely busy. They have already produced half a dozen different substances, including insulin, human growth hormone and interferon, the antiviral agent being investigated as a cancer cure. Genentech (pronounced jeh-nen-tek) has also paid off handsomely for Boyer (his initial investment: $500). Offered publicly last October, its stock shot up within 20 minutes...
...Though Genentech was the most prominent of the new biotechnology firms to go public, it is only one of many contenders in this rapidly expanding business, which got a strong boost last year by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that new life forms are patentable. (The first gene-splicing patent was for Boyer and Cohen's work.) Nor is Boyer, who remains at the University of California, the only academician with commercial ties. In 1980 dozens of scientists signed up with gene-engineering firms...
...pockets of surprising strength and While the Midwest and the auto were suffering depression-like areas of New England and the Coast, where the computer industry other high technology firms have plants, hardly felt the slump. Investors who would not touch a steel stock to buy new issues of Genentech, a Francisco-based genetic engineering or Apple Computer, the California maker of personal computers. Unemployment in Massachusetts was only 5%, or one-third less than the national level. Colorado and other Rocky Mountain prospered with the search for new domestic energy sources. Electronic and computer firms made the Southwest...
...diamonds; and institutions have soaked up about 70% of the larger initial public offerings this year. For example, Chemical Bank's $90 million Aggressive Equity Fund bought stock in Applicon, Cado Systems, Boston Digital and BancTec, all high-technology companies, as well as 5,000 shares of Genentech at its initial price...