Genentech

Drive-by — two men, a beer, and a bacterium: where “The Industrial City” became “The Birthplace of Biotechnology.”

Key facts

Founded April 7, 1976 by Robert Swanson and Herbert Boyer
1978: first synthetic human insulin made using recombinant DNA
1982: that insulin (Humulin) becomes the first FDA-approved genetically engineered drug
South San Francisco now brands itself “The Birthplace of Biotechnology”

Narration transcript

Notice the street name as we drive through: DNA Way. That's not a joke — it's the address of the company that invented an industry, and you're rolling right through its campus on your right.

The story starts in 1976, in a bar, with two men and a beer. One was Herbert Boyer, a scientist at UC San Francisco who had helped work out how to cut a gene out of one living thing and splice it into another. The other was Robert Swanson, a young venture capitalist convinced that trick could be turned into medicine. Their first meeting was supposed to last ten minutes; it lasted three hours, and by the end they'd founded Genentech.

Two years later, in 1978, Genentech's scientists did something that had never been done: they got bacteria to manufacture synthetic human insulin. For the first time, a human protein drug could be brewed instead of extracted — and by 1982 that insulin was approved and on the market, the first genetically engineered medicine in history. An entire industry, biotechnology, was born on this flat patch of bayshore.

And here's why it belongs on this tour. Look at where you are: the same cheap, flat land by the bay that lured the meatpackers a hundred years earlier is what lured Genentech, too — room to build, next to a great city, just over the line. The Industrial City didn't die when the slaughterhouses closed; it reinvented itself, and it never took down that old sign on the hill. “The Industrial City” and “The Birthplace of Biotechnology” are the same town, boasting twice. One stop to go — down to the water's edge.