Fourteen Years, 1000 Students Later

A Fond Goodbye to Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology at Columbia

On an air conditioned but still hot July morning in 1986, a senior surgeon hands me a scalpel, addresses me as doctor, and tells me to make my first incision.

My hand and the knife hover over the patient’s abdomen like a helicopter over a traffic accident before I take a timid swipe and barely scratch the skin. My colleague waits patiently for me to shake off my nervousness, and a couple of hours later, the patient and I — an intern — are both in stable condition in the recovery room.

It’s 2011. I sit at my desk — a grid of PowerPoint slides on one computer monitor, my course outline on the other. I am a novice again, midway through preparing the 28 lectures that I will make up Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology.

Only for the moment, I’m doing a lot of staring and very little PowerPointing, and the prospect of teaching an entire course for the first time seems just as daunting as performing surgery. Medicine is a teaching culture. Second-year students show first-year students how to throw square knots, interns give impromptu seminars on fluid management during quiet moments in the intensive care unit, and bow-tied internists happily teach anyone, from the post call-chief resident to a flower-cart pushing volunteer. I left medicine, but I never stopped teaching.

My students-to-be are an extremely smart group: a mixture of undergrads, masters, and Ph.D.s in the sciences, hoping to cram as much of a business education as they can into one semester. I worry about letting them down. I focus on them and try to anticipate their expectations. I stop polishing my delivery and start listening for clarity. Ray Bradbury once said that living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. I used to think that cliff jumping was a young person’s sport, but fourteen years ago I walking along edges, wing blueprints in hand.

Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology, BIOT 4180, lasts ten semesters, with frequent breaks in between. It starts with thirty students and ends with thirty students, growing as large as 405 and shrinking to as small as seven. It changes from lectures to constant interaction, the students pitching their ideas over and over again, polishing the process by which they convince others to invest in them, work for them, collaborate with them.

Believe in them.

For a business course there was a lot of Aristotle and Maslow. There was no syllabus (does entrepreneurship have a syllabus?) Worse, students did not know how they would be graded. Attendance was mandatory. Exams were given (or not). Notebooks were randomly collected, read, and handed back a week later, unmarked. Maybe some of the students recognized that they were called to pitch more than others, and some may have realized that the quality of the questions they asked affected whether they were assigned to pitch to a fictitious friend of the family or the most misanthropic venture capitalist having a bad day. I could play either role, and by the end of the semester so could they.

Looking back, while I thought I was teaching the four tracks of company formation (organization, finding, serial proofs of concept and protecting the proprietary), in reality I was teaching precision and clarity. Painting pictures with words that transported a vision from one mind to the next and the next, being able to answer the question “where did that number come from” both by quoting the source and by deriving it on the spot. Every number was questioned. No imprecise term passed without a demand for a better definition. In Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology, if it couldn’t be measured it didn’t exist.

Without a formal syllabus, we let a life lessons sneak into the classroom too. Much of biotechnology is healthcare, so the students left knowing the importance of being anti-exploitative. Their tools box had separate compartments for ethos (but specific beliefs and assumptions, not lazily making the world a better place), logos (derive your numbers, build your model but be ready to defend and know the equation from which it was derived) and pathos. Who are you helping and how badly do they hurt?

It’s a cliche that teachers learn as much from their students as the students learn from them. An undergraduate chemist described a balance sheet as what we own on the left side and how we paid for it on the right — the best description I ever heard. My job was to give them a template with which to solve problems, to answer the most basic questions: what problem am I solving? Who am I helping? How do I travel from idea to tangible benefit? How do I define and measure progress?

To start: don’t make @#$ up. Remember that biology always wins. That concrete is easier to see than abstract, and that if you can only negotiate if you have options, and that being able to walk away is the best option. Think like an obstetrician and know that whatever the situation, you’ll do a better job if you’re calmer than everyone else.

Fourteen years, a thousand students, and a few dozen Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology rules later, it’s BIOT4180’s time for an exit.

Now on to the textbook.