Gene Dreams.

• Author: Werth, Barry

Gene Dreams. Robert Teitelman. Harper, and Row, $18,95. If ever an industry was made to titillate Wall Street's "promiscuous imagination" (Teitelman's smart phrase, and one of many in this lively, sharply-drawn book), biotechnology was it. It roared out of the laboratory at a time when America's industrial selfimage was in shards. it was jazzy. It reflected the heat and light of the great entrepreneurial revolution just before it, in electronics. And it made promises. Oh, what promises! Oilspill-eating bacteria, toxic-waste devourers, leaner hogs, supercorn, miracle cures. Seldom has Wall Street been so dreamily, so willingly seduced as it was by these biojocks, who, with their cockiness and their flare for futuristic letterheads (Genentech, Biogen, Hybritech, Cetus) arrived on the scene seeming to know all the right moves.

Of course the seduction was mutual. The researchers were dazzled by Wall Street's overheated advances. Many of them couldn't shed their

academic prudery fast enough. As Teitelman points out, they "began to think of Wall Street not as a grim Golgotha, but as a Golconda ... a legendary city where everyone who passes through got rich."' It should be no surprise that the industry soon became infatuated with Wall Street's rapturous murmurings, relegating all its other high-minded goals behind the development of the most marketable. toweringly profitable products it could think of-human pharmaceuticals. Drugs.

Imagine Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider getting married at the end of Last Tango in Paris, settling in and trying to make it work, and you get some idea of the outcome. Boredom, recriminations, verbal cru- elty, abandonment-not a pretty sight. Wall Street's well-publicized dissatisfaction with biotech, and the industry's subsequent squandering of its future vision in a blizzard of compromises and short-term deal making, is a perfect paradigm for the sort of self-destructive plunder on which the bull market of the eighties so far has fed successfully. That it should have happened with such a young industry, so filled with promise, makes biotech's dissolution all the more troubling.

Gene Dreams is built around the story of one company, Seattle-based Genetic Systems. Like many biotech firms, Genetic Systems was more a result of money pursuing science than the other way around. For example, the first public offering of another biotech company, Genentech, in October 1980 was so mindboggling-50 minutes after the first one...