Phillip A. Sharp has enjoyed a front-row seat for the revolution known as biotechnology. As a young professor of biology at MIT in 1977, he checked out-at the request of several venture capitalists-an obscure California company called Genentech, which had the preposterous notion of using recombinant DNA to create pharmaceuticals. Later that year, when Genentech announced it had made a human protein from a synthetic gene, the world learned publicly what Sharp had understood privately: Genetic engineering technology would transform medicine.

In the spring of 1978, Sharp had the chance to put theory into practice. Those same venture capitalists recruited him and other prominent biologists from the United States and Europe to form the core of a new startup. The result, Cambridge, Mass.-based Biogen, remains one of the pioneering biotechnology firms; today, Sharp serves on the company's board of directors and chairs its scientific advisory board, assessing potential research initiatives and overseeing the journey of drugs from lab bench to market.