Knowledge for the betterment of human health

William Haseltine: pioneer in healthcare

William A. Haseltine is the former CEO of Human Genomes Sciences, a company he founded while a faculty member at Harvard.

The lessons from his Berkeley experience run deep with William Haseltine. He entered the University over forty years ago, a self-described “conservative kid from a military background” with an eye on becoming a doctor. Four years later he emerged a product of the Free Speech Movement and an innovative program known as Extraordinary Students, intent on doing science to solve societal and medical problems. A gifted scientist, Haseltine (B.A. Chem, ’66) entered Berkeley in 1962 and was quickly taken under the wing of senior chemists in the College. “I became a scientist because of George Pimentel,” notes Haseltine fondly. “Pimentel referred to himself as a fisherman for scientists, and I was one of the fish that he hooked. He diverted my career into science.” Back in the early 1960s, all of the senior chemistry professors were required to spend an hour a day in Chem 1A with the undergraduate students, and they brought to the chair’s attention any young scientist who they believed had potential. Haseltine was quickly recommended to a special summer program run by Pimentel.

“The fifteen participants read the papers of one of the top UC chemists at that time—Chamberlin, Calvin, Urey, for example—and then spent a day with him. We did this once a week over 10 weeks. It was quite a privilege for all of us young scientists, meeting and talking with such distinguished chemists. It was a completely open environment and made quite an impression on me.”

During his second year, as part of the program, Haseltine did independent research with senior faculty members, beginning in Pimentel’s group. “He was designing the infrared spectroscopy analysis equipment for the first Mars flyby. I personally created an artificial Martian atmosphere in the lab in order to examine it spectroscopically, and we wrote up the findings for Science magazine—my first publication,” says Haseltine. “This was an exciting project that pushed the limits of our knowledge. We had to come up with a definition of life so that we could distinguish between life and nonlife, and had to consider all contingencies. We came up with what I still think is the best definition of life that is out there: a self-replicating system that is error prone and capable of reproducing its errors. This is a great definition because it allows for evolution, and it also tells us that life is not really a chemical difference, just an organizational difference.”

Other undergraduate projects of Haseltine’s at Berkeley resulted in more journal papers. Under the direction of C. Bradley Moore, he investigated the use of lasers for communications between earth and vehicles in outer space. “I built an isotopically shifted carbon dioxide laser (using CO182) to penetrate the atmosphere. I could shine it to San Francisco without any problems. Also, working with Ignacio Tinoco, I measured the solubility of guanosine in preparation for his later extensive work on confirmation analysis of polynucleotides.”

Berkeley affected Haseltine’s political leanings as well. He was deeply involved in the Free Speech Movement, in which students protested against the administration, demanding the removal of the ban on on-campus political activities and recognition of the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom. “I was the first guy to jump in front of the police car when they tried to arrest Jack Weinberg [a former graduate student who had set up a table in front of Sproul Hall in defiance of the administration’s ban]. The car was surrounded by [about 3,000] protesters, and we sat there for three days.” Today, if you go to the famous colorful mural on Telegraph Avenue, Haseltine is among one of the students you can see memorialized in the mural, kneeling in front of the police car.
His Berkeley sensibility stayed with him as his career advanced, first as a graduate student at Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1973. “During this period I wrote three anti-Vietnam War articles for the New Republic, one of which broke the Agent Orange story detailing the discovery that the defoliant—widely used in Vietnam— caused development malformations in utero.

While he was having an impact in the political world, he was also working to get the best scientific training possible. He performed his graduate work under the direction of two of the giants of molecular biology—James D. Watson and Walter Gilbert—because, as he notes, he “wished to receive the most advanced training in fundamental biological research then available as a foundation for my later medical research.” He did his post-graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with David Baltimore before joining the faculty at Harvard in 1976.

As a professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for almost 20 years, Dr. Haseltine made fundamental contributions to the understanding of cancer and AIDS, including the first sequencing of HIV, and published more than 250 papers in the scientific and medical literature.

“I left Berkeley wanting to do science for medicine and for society. At Harvard I quickly realized that molecular biology was the new hot field, and I decided to devote my career to the creation of new knowledge for the betterment of human health,” he explained. “I learned chemistry, physics, math, and biology, so that I could have all tools, and this education has served me extremely well.”

The “radical” fire that had been ignited in him at Berkeley still burned, however. During his years on the Harvard faculty he was a tireless educator of undergraduate and graduate students, creating and teaching a course for many years on the social implications of biological science to non-science Harvard undergraduates. He was a pioneer in AIDS research, establishing the first academic department devoted to finding a cure and vaccine for AIDS. He played an important early role in public awareness of AIDS, helping to obtain both public and private financing for AIDS research, founding amfAR ( American Foundation for AIDS Research) and organizing the efforts of pharmaceutical companies to invest in treatments for AIDS. Dr. Haseltine has served on the board of many charitable foundations and as an editor of a number of scientific journals.

His business career has been just as distinguished. Beginning in 1982 with Cambridge BioSciences, Haseltine founded seven biotechnology companies, all in different areas of healthcare. As an advisor to HealthCare Ventures, Inc., a venture-capital company, he helped to create another twenty biotechnology companies. “I started creating companies because I could take knowledge and use it to patients’ benefit quickly.”

He founded Human Genome Sciences (HGS) in 1992 and helped spearhead the genomics business field. HGS has been the first to isolate most of the human genes and has decoded the sequence of several infectious disease organisms. “With HGS, our idea, which turned out to be a revolutionary one, was to separate genomics from genetics. We considered each gene as a unique entity, without thought to its inheritance. Then, by understanding what the individual gene product did, we could figure out its function and where it fits in cellular activities. This idea transformed the industry, and it’s been very satisfying to see this idea catch on. People copied it because it worked.”

Today, Haseltine is working to speed up the process of developing new knowledge to benefit patients. “It is too slow and inefficient, with the result that drugs cost too much and there is too little access.” He is currently working to change healthcare delivery in India through no-loss hospitals to deliver high-tech, high-quality, high-volume healthcare.

He is also helping members of the college fulfill their revolutionary healthcare goals, through his membership on the board for OneWorld Health, the nonprofit pharmaceutical company that has partnered with chemical engineering professor Jay Keasling to develop his malaria drug research and deliver it to the patients in affected areas—people who need it most and can least afford it. “Keasling is extraordinarily creative and innovative, and OneWorld’s mission is something that I am very interested in.”

Haseltine’s outstanding career has been facilitated by his first-rate training in chemistry at Berkeley, he fervently believes. “I just didn’t learn about chemistry. I learned how to do great science from great scientists,” he says. “I learned that the most important part of science is imagination, and the key is to know what to work on—find that one small problem that, when solved, can answer the big question.

“Also, I learned that science is a combination of passion with intellect. And it’s the passion that you learn from the great scientists. No matter what the personality, when it comes to work they are all as passionate as any Italian diva.”