By the late 1980s, though, after an astonishing growth spurt, Genentech ran out of existing drugs to mass-produce using recombinant technology. Its early victories, after all, had been the result of a process and not a product: the company had found a radical new way to produce old medicines. Now, as Genentech set out to invent new drugs from scratch, it was forced to change its winning strategy: it needed to find targets for drugs—proteins in cells that might play a critical role in the physiology of a disease that might, in turn, be turned on or off by other proteins produced using
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