The Faces Behind Biotech

Rich Heyman’s first job was at the Salk Institute, as a young scientist in 1986 earning $16,500 a year. And that was after investing 10 years in high school, college and postgraduate schooling.

“My friends and family would ask me, ‘When in the hell are you going to join the real world and make some money?”

Today, he’s making more money, and says he has the potential to get wealthy, as a supervising scientist at Ligand Pharmaceuticals.

He had the credentials to land a job just about anywhere. With a Ph.D. in pharmacology, he spent three years at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., a year with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and another four years doing postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute.

There, he received job offers from large pharmaceutical companies all around the country, but instead he joined Ligand, where he already had been doing consultant work. That was in 1990, and today Heyman, 33, is studying how hormones affect the body’s proteins. Proteins manufacture enzymes, which, in turn, are the catalysts for the body’s biochemical reactions.

“By understanding how hormones control biological events, we gain insight into disease,” Heyman said.

“The larger companies are more interested in the bottom line, of developing and marketing a final product that may make them hundreds of millions of dollars. Here, we can pursue drugs that may lead to a million-dollar product--and which, to me, may be scientifically more interesting,” he said.

“That’s what excites me, of doing good science along the way. Maybe that’s because I’m younger. I’m more idealistic.”

On bad days, he says, “I’m quiet and introverted. I drive home (to Encinitas) and reinterpret the experiments. Did I screw up? Why didn’t it work? How can I redesign the experiment? I read Science magazine at night. I come in on weekends. I’m always thinking science.”