Contrary Valley

Money + Science + Values = The Best Company

I heard Newt Gingrich on NPR the other day giving a thoughtful essay about political culture.  He quoted Ronald Reagan as saying something to the effect of, "there are no easy answers, but there are simple answers." 

To explain how the biotechnology company Genentech came to be cited by Fortune magazine as "the best company to work for" out of hundreds of companies is pretty easy; you can read Fortune's criteria for choosing the winner (much of it is based on the employees' own feedback about their employer.)  How did this, the first "biotech" company, come to be? Take a brilliant scientist, Herb Boyer, working with other brilliant scientists, mix in some venture capital, and infuse the mix with strong moral values and a mission to address "significant unmet medical needs."

Simple, elegant, but the furthest thing from easy.  Here's to all the good folks at Genetech and their courageous leaders for being a role model of a company for the rest of us. And for showcasing SCIENTISTS in a country that could do a whole lot more to value them.

(See Fortune's complete list of the top 100 companies to work for here.  And congratulations to #2, Wegmans, affectionately known in upstate New York as "Weggies.")

Intelligent Design Humor

From an article in the Fall 2005 Penn Arts & Sciences Magazine by Peter Nichols entitled "Creative License:"

A cleric once asked J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), the British population geneticist, what he might infer about the deity, based on his lifetime of close observation of the natural world. Haldane replied that the creator seemed to have "an inordinate fondness for beetles." Entomologists have described and named more than 350,000 species of coleoptera since 1758. "One of every five species of living organisms - which includes plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and everything else - is a beetle," says Jason Weintraub, entomology collection manager at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences.

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