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Mother of Invention | THE DRIVE FOR START-UP SUCCESS PUTS UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS IN BUSINESS

iN 2003, CHEMIST TYLER MCQUADE had an idea: What if you could radically streamline the process by which drugs are synthesized, simultaneously cutting waste and cost? Such an innovation could reshape the pharmaceutical business, not only saving money and helping the environment but improving access to life-saving medication for millions worldwide. It's a slam-dunk--except for one problem: because of patent and licensing issues, the industry won't touch it. McQuade is an academic researcher, so the rights to his inventions belong to the University. And Cornell, having provided McQuade with his laboratory space and graduate assistants, doesn't want to give his idea away for free.

The solution to this legal logjam--not uncommon in academia--turns out to be almost as complex as the invention itself. McQuade worked with the University to pursue a patent and negotiate future licensing of his technology back to himself. This spring, he began the quest for venture capital, and within a few years--if he's lucky--he'll launch his own business, Sustainable Pharmaceutics. "It was going to be difficult to get the pharmaceutical industry to take notice of my work, because it doesn't make sense to them yet," says the thirty-three-year-old assistant professor. "I figured if I'm going to prove it, the best way is in the marketplace--put my money where my mouth is."

Entering the business fray can be a huge gamble for someone trained in the sciences. But for university inventors, going the start-up route is an effective strategy for getting technology out into the world--especially since 1980, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, making it possible for universities and inventors to profit from the patenting of intellectual property derived from governmentfunded research. "The Bayh-Dole legislation recognized that what would be enhancing about all this technology transfer would be for the university to benefit," says biological engineering professor and former vice president for research Norm Scott. "It tried to establish a foundation for universities that have made expenditures in support of research to recoup some of those costs and stimulate people to move forward on commercialization."

It seems to be working: Cornell currently holds more than 850 active patents, filing upwards of 200 applications each year and gaining about 80 patents annually. In 2004, the University collected $7.3 million in licensing revenue, more than doubling the previous year's earnings of $3.1 million. The Cornell Center for Technology, Enterprise, and Commercialization (CCTEC), the office charged with overseeing patents, licensing, royalties, and enforcement, walks inventors through each step--from applying for the patent to hiring a patent lawyer and managing the filing process.

Once a patent has been issued, CCTEC assesses the best options for licensing-- either to an existing company or, as in McQuade's case, back to the inventor.While the University says that all licensing agreements must advance the technology, implementation has its challenges."A corporation has its own approach to the world and its gadget," says Scott, who holds three patents to facilitate bovine artificial insemination. "Your idea might be better, but their version already has development costs associated with it." In most cases, Scott says, licensing to an inventor-launched start-up is more promising. "Professors and graduate students can take the idea forward at a pretty low level of commercialization. If it starts taking market share away from a larger company, they may say, ‘Let's make a deal,' which often means buying out the start-up."

According to Roger Williams, director of technology transfer for Cornell's Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies, younger faculty tend to have more interest in technology transfer-- "and not just for money-grubbing reasons," he says. "They recognize that it's a way to get their technology out and in use. If they profit or the University profits, it's a bonus." Incubating start-ups can also bolster the local economy--and improve the University's recruiting power. "Technology transfer is probably the best way to create high-tech jobs and a viable regional economy,"Williams says.

That's why schools such as MIT and Stanford have opted to streamline the licensing process, bargaining that a high volume of start-ups guarantees at least a few big winners. Other schools consider patents among the credits toward tenure, or let inventors take faculty leave to pursue commercial projects. But the interests of pure research sometimes coexist uneasily with the business considerations of venture capitalists and industry. "If everyone's thinking along the same lines-- in terms of company development and getting more jobs here-- there really isn't a conflict," says Zach Shulman '87, JD '90, a lecturer in entrepreneurship at the Johnson School and executive director of BR Legal, which offers legal advice to start-ups. Problems arise when the licensing process drags out, or CCTEC and the licensing company disagree on terms. "Ideally, people negotiate, they come to terms, everyone's happy," says Shulman. "That's the way it's supposed to work."

And when it doesn't, says Scott, competing agendas are to blame. "Everybody is trying to get something for themselves, to put it crudely," says Scott. "CCTEC tries to get as much money as it can both for the inventor and the University. The company's out to get everything it can for nothing."

McQuade's foray into tech transfer grew out of his desire to improve global access to prescription drugs and change a statistic the environmentally minded chemist found alarming: for each unit of product on retail shelves, the multi-step processing used to make drugs can generate 100 times that volume in waste, mostly in discarded solvents. His technique reduces the waste via a new approach to chemical synthesis, and future work will further cut waste by employing supersmall catalysts that mimic biological processes. It's the chemical equivalent of one-stop shopping. "We're trying to make drug synthesis like going to Target," he says. "We avoid toxic solvents, look for unnecessary steps, and try to create new catalysts that can circumvent or combine pathways. If you put all of the reactions you need to make a chemical product under one roof, you're going to reduce the amount of waste."

2002, he won a $200,000 early-career award from the New York State Office of Technology and Academic Research, and MIT's Technology Review named him one of its 100 young innovators of the year in 2004. This spring, the Johnson School awarded Sustainable Pharmaceutics the top prize in its 2005 Business Idea Competition--$ 10,000 and twenty hours of legal counsel. The company's first product will be a new process for a generic version of the antidepressant Prozac. The namebrand drug has a $200 million market in the U.S.; the world market for generic versions is estimated at $710 million. Also in the works: Ribavirin, a generic AIDS drug, and Gabapentin, an epilepsy medication with a $1.7 billion market.

It's a potential gold mine, but McQuade isn't planning on becoming a drug tycoon. "A pharmaceutical company would have to change everything they do to implement my process," he admits."But if I start showing that I can make drugs inexpensively, they may turn to Sustainable Pharmaceutics." And then, he says, he might just get his chance to save the world. "I would love to create a situation where we are conscious of waste and caring about the environment, but we're also caring about economics. If everybody would turn to me, I can manufacture things in a sustainable manner."

--Sharon Tregaskis '95

Liquid Assets | JERRY HOWARD '84, MBA '85, HELPS BRING CLEAN WATER TO THE DEVELOPING WORLD

i'M AN INTERNATIONALIST," JERRY Howard says, which is something of an understatement. As the worldwide head of strategy for Coca-Cola in the late 1990s, he visited forty countries in four years--"basically everywhere but Cuba and Libya."

But it was water, not Coke, that brought him to Honduras.

As a board member of WaterPartners International, Howard '84, MBA '85, is using his global business acumen to help communities in the developing world secure their own sources of clean water.

He and other WaterPartners directors visited remote villages in western Honduras, the site of the nonprofit's largest project in Central America, in 2003. Driving for two days on unpaved roads, they passed small farms on terraced mountainsides and people riding burros or walking, often barefoot. Howard had traveled to similarly poor, rural areas in Kenya and South Africa--but not in the Western Hemisphere. "I saw a lot of children with bloated stomachs," he says. "You'd have families with six children and three would survive."

Before Howard had even heard of WaterPartners, he had already developed an interest in international issues, thanks to the dozen years that he, his wife, Deborah Seavey Howard '84, MS '85, and their two sons had lived in Japan and Australia while he worked for Procter & Gamble. And he happened to be reading Vandana Shiva's Water Wars, which anticipates that water will be the source of global conflict in the twenty-first century, when Jeff Varick, a friend and former client who was then board chair of WaterPartners, recruited him to the board in 2002.

So it didn't take him long to understand clean water's impact on the developing world. "It was one of those smackyourself- on-the-forehead moments," he says. "It was clear to me that so many programs seem to be treating symptoms-- infant mortality, for example. Most of those situations can be traced to bad water and bad sanitation."

The statistics bear him out. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 80 percent of all sickness is caused by unsafe water and sanitation.And a third of the developing world's population is infected with intestinal worms that can lead to malnutrition, anemia, and retarded growth. Clean water systems, like those Howard and the WaterPartners group saw in Honduras, can prevent the spread of these parasites. The group had planned a first-hand look at a water project in the village of Cholunquez. But the night before they arrived, an unusually hard rain triggered a landslide that pummeled the system's piping, leaving 2,200 people without water. It also left WaterPartners co-founder Marla Smith-Nilson in a bind.

"So here I am," Smith-Nilson recalls, "with our entire board, wanting to show off the great water system that their efforts had helped create, and the water isn't flowing," she said. "It wasn't exactly the visit I had planned."

In fact, she couldn't have planned it better. Early the next morning, a team of local fontaneros, or plumbers, trained and hired by Cholunquez's water committee, assessed the damage and fixed the pipe. Howard was impressed. "It was clear whose responsibility it was to find out the problem, and then repair it," he says. "By eleven that morning, it was working."

That's exactly how WaterPartners' projects are designed to function--without outside help. Typically villagers create a committee that oversees the system's construction, ownership, and maintenance, and it bills each household for water use.WaterPartners provides materials, expertise, and oversight, while other nonprofits already in the community facilitate the process, which includes watershed protection, construction of latrines, and hygiene classes. These nonprofits, such as CARE and Catholic Relief Services, often identify the communities that both lack clean water and can tackle the project. "They can be your eyes and ears in the market to help identify these needs,"Howard says.

These partnerships have resulted in sixty-three systems since 1990, in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Honduras, India, Kenya, and the Philippines. Each is still operating.

It's community participation that makes them sustainable, says Daniel Loucks, PhD '65, a Cornell professor of civil and environmental engineering. "It's messy, but it's democratic, and it is a way to come up with solutions that are not just based on the best economics or the best engineering." Loucks, who specializes in water resource and environmental management systems, says, "The best overall decision is one that's informed by all the stakeholders, and that has a better chance of surviving and changing and doing some good than an expert coming in and taking over."

Given that community- based approach, Howard's contribution to WaterPartners draws less on his degree in operations research and industrial engineering than on his MBA and business experience. Now the head of Strategy First Partners, a marketing consulting firm for Fortune 500 companies, he's helping WaterPartners strategize the deployment of two $1 million grants. Provided by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and the Agora Foundation, they are the largest gifts in WaterPartners' fifteen-year history. The money will fund a micro-lending scheme called WaterCredit, aimed at communities too rich to qualify for a WaterPartners grant but too poor to pay outright for their own water system.

The ripple effect of clean tap water improves not only health, but also education and local economies. Instead of walking for hours to collect unclean water, children will be attending school while adults can grow more food. No other intervention has greater overall impact upon a country's development and public health than safe drinking water and sanitation, according to the WHO.

Howard saw the proof in Honduras.

"As an issue, once you spend five minutes on it, it seems so fundamentally obvious," he says. "You've got water, you've got education, and the rest will follow."

-- Susan Kelley

Unveiled | BRINGING HOPE--AND PROPER HAIR CARE-- TO WAR-WEARY AFGHANISTAN

iN MAY 2002, JUST MONTHS after the fall of the Taliban, Rosemary Stasek '85 joined a small delegation of Afghan expatriates on a trip to Kabul organized by a San Francisco human rights organization. At the time, Stasek was a Web developer and former mayor of Mountain View, California, a Silicon Valley town of 75,000 with a large Afghan-American community. She'd never been to Afghanistan, spoke no Farsi, and had only the vaguest sense that something very bad had been happening in the beleaguered Central Asian country. Flying into Kabul International on a threadbare Air France jet repurposed for Ariana--the national carrier that white-knuckle passengers (invoking the Arabic expression for "God willing") often call "Insh'allah Air"--she marveled at the burnt-out fuselages of old Soviet aircraft lining the runway. For two weeks she toured a nation reduced to rubble by war, famine, and the Taliban regime. And she couldn't wait to go back. "I fell in love with the place," she says. "I decided, this is what I have to do."

A year later, she returned, this time on her own with $5,000 of donations in hand to help rebuild a women's prison. She made two more visits in 2004 before making the move semi-permanent: in January 2005, after her term on the city council expired, she started her new job--logistics manager for the Kabul Beauty School, a hair salon and cosmetology college that helps train Afghan women to run their own home businesses. Stasek is now one of a handful of Americans--outside of security contractors and the military personnel largely restricted to nearby Bagram Air Base--living and working in the chaotic work-in-progress that is post-Taliban Kabul.

Stasek admits she's an odd fit for a beauty school--"I don't even wear lipstick," she says. As logistics manager, her duties involve scrounging supplies from the city's bazaars and navigating the labyrinthine Afghan bureaucracy. Odder still, perhaps, is the notion of hairdressers as nation-builders. But in a city where many women were literally imprisoned in their homes for the five years of Taliban rule, a beauty school makes both an economic and political statement. Glamour is an important cottage industry in Kabul: hundreds of women run salons out of their homes, and there is tremendous pent-up demand for beauticians who can duplicate the elaborate hair and makeup styles popularized in fashion magazines from Iran and Dubai. "Women used to be whipped for using nail polish," says Stasek. "Still, even under the Taliban they were wearing lipstick underneath their burkas. They never forgot."

The burka is an increasingly rare sight on Kabul streets. Stasek estimates that perhaps 15 percent of the city's women still wear the billowing head-to-toe coverings that have become a symbol of fundamentalist Islam. Despite a recent wave of anti-U.S. rioting and the bombing of the Internet cafe Stasek once frequented, she says that the city is safer than it once was, as a flood of returning refugees--and Western NGOs--has turned Kabul into a boom town. "It's lessMad Max,more Wild West," Stasek says. "There are restaurants and traffic and new buildings going up. If you really need a box of Frosted Flakes, you can probably find it."

But cultural norms are slower to change.Many men frown on the school and its empowering mission, in part because a hairdresser can easily out-earn her husband. "There's a lot of resentment of the idea that women are making a lot of money," says Stasek, who claims that 90 percent of the school's graduates land jobs, either running their own home salons or working in shops that cater to the thousands of international aid workers in the city. In a country where the average wage hovers around $2 per day, the prospect of earning $10 per haircut is worth the risk. "The women who come to us are the gutsy ones. But they can make amazing money."

The three-month cosmetology course covers more than just perms and manicures: there are language classes in English and written Farsi, and the students receive instruction in basic women's health issues. "We're trying to cram in as much sedition as we can in three months," jokes Stasek, who sees her work as an extension of her activism on women's issues: she's also founded a nonprofit charitable organization to help raise funds. Additional money comes from the Oasis Salon in Kabul, a private parlor staffed by the school's graduates, some of whom go on to teach incoming classes.

The beauty school has faced a number of challenges in its brief existence. Founded in 2002, the project was initially bankrolled by donations from the cosmetics industry and headquartered in the Afghan Ministry ofWomen's Affairs, with a faculty of American and Afghan-American stylists. (A recent documentary film, The Beauty Academy of Kabul, chronicled the first class of students.) Debbie Rodriguez, a Michigan hairdresser and former relief worker, took the helm after the film crew left, and the struggling beauty school temporarily relocated to rented quarters. In May, Stasek and Rodriguez signed the papers for a new facility that the school would own outright for $30,000. "We don't exactly have all that money at the moment," Stasek writes via e-mail, "but I did some creative accounting and outright borrowing, and I'm hoping it will all work out."

Stasek seems to thrive on such adversity. An economics major and varsity football team manager at Cornell, she grew up in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania and moved to California to work in the computer industry after graduation. Politics and activism have been ongoing pursuits--she co-founded California Catholics for Free Choice, a reproductive rights organization, in 1989 and traveled to Cuba with a women's group in 1998-- but the move to Kabul still shocked her family. "They all had a stroke," she says. High technology brings a modicum of normalcy to daily life.Her rented quarters now boast an Internet hookup so she can update her blog (www.stasek.com/ afghanistan/blog) and continue her career as a Web developer; she still administers several websites for various clients, even though electricity flows for a only few hours in the evening.Mail service is even less reliable."My Economist subscription still hasn't found me," she says.

Stasek plans to stay on in Afghanistan at least until late summer, when the beauty school begins classes in its new home.And despite the recent unrest, she's cautiously optimistic about the future. This spring, the long-dry Kabul River flowed for the first time in decades, the result of heavy winter snows that broke a persistent drought. To long-suffering Kabulites, Stasek says, it seemed a hopeful sign. "The people say it's God's blessing for peace."

--David Dudley

Dress Code | WAS A HARVARD LIBRARIAN "TOO SEXY" FOR HER JOB?

dESIREE GOODWIN '87 RELISHES the idea of being different. A librarian at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, she takes pride in looking attractive, dressing stylishly, and being an accomplished dancer--all part of what she once called her "neverending quest to defy the image of the typical librarian." But her employer, Goodwin says, doesn't appreciate her efforts: according to a lawsuit she filed for race and gender discrimination in March, she has been passed over for promotion sixteen times. At the center of the case was her contention that her supervisors deemed her ineligible for higher-level jobs because of her appearance. Her boss, Goodwin claims, once told her she was "too sexy" and colleagues said she was considered "a joke" because of the way she dresses.

Goodwin overcame an impoverished and itinerant childhood to earn an undergraduate degree from Cornell and two master's degrees, one in English literature from Boston College and a second in library science from Simmons College. She has worked at Harvard since 1994, but contends that the decision-makers in the university's library system have consistently overlooked her qualifications and rejected her applications for higher-level positions. In the court case, Harvard's lawyers blamed Goodwin's lack of advancement on fierce competition--not her appearance--and said she was simply unqualified for the jobs she sought.

The all-white jury of five men and one woman agreed, deliberating for less than four hours before submitting a decision in favor of Harvard to Judge Joseph Tauro, JD '56. The jury "conflated her race, her gender, and her looks," says Richard Clarey, Goodwin's lawyer. "It was a lethal combination." Goodwin was bitterly disappointed. "The message that this verdict sends," she says, "is that it doesn't matter how much experience or education you have, [employers] can still put more weight on other intangible factors, and the courts will do nothing to protect you."

The relationship between attractiveness and perceptions of workplace competency is complex, says Madeline Heilman '67, a psychology professor at New York University. "Being good-looking is often a liability [for women] in the workforce-- but not always," she says. For those seeking lower-level jobs, Heilman explains, beauty is usually an asset; for managerial jobs, it can be a disadvantage. That's because the more attractive a person is, the more that person is identified with gender stereotypes: competence is seen as compatible with ideals of masculinity but incompatible with ideals of femininity.

Inappropriate or simply unusual dress can also obscure intelligence and ability, says historian and human development professor Joan Jacobs Brumberg of the College of Human Ecology. "In terms of upward mobility, women pay a real price for deviance in style of dress," she says.

According to Harvard Business School professor David Thomas, the author of Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America, minority women must work even harder than white women to project the right image."Dress can have an impact of igniting or diminishing stereotypes," he says, "and dress is even more important among certain minority groups that are negatively stigmatized, because people are trying to figure out how to relate to you as a member of that group and as a member of the work group."

When this happens, the loss goes beyond the fate of individual careers, as Heilman noted in "Sometimes Beauty Can Be Beastly," an op-ed piece she wrote for the New York Times. "Because potentially valuable talent may be disregarded," wrote Heilman, "organizations as well as individual applicants stand to lose." Because attractive women seeking managerial positions appear to be penalized for their looks, the implication is that women should strive to be unattractive, Heilman states. But that should not be the case; rather, organizations should reduce the pressure on women to "look good" if such organizations wish to reap the benefits of female talent.

In court, Goodwin claimed that her supervisor, Barbara Mitchell--who had given her positive written evaluations-- told her that she was "just a pretty girl" and that she would have trouble fitting in if she were promoted to a position at Harvard's Widener Library. Mitchell denied saying this (and did not return calls for comment), but Judith Malone, a Harvard lawyer, concedes that Mitchell did "raise the issue of the importance of looking professional" when talking to Goodwin.

Goodwin says she plans to remain in her current position and will continue to apply for jobs at Harvard and elsewhere. In the meantime, she has toned down her dress--she now wears long, bulky sweaters that hide her figure. "I've been a straight-A student and I do a tremendous volume of work in the library," she says. "The fact that the focus has been on my appearance is superficial and shallow, and it's shocking to me, especially at a place like Harvard."

-- Tamar Morade

Who's the Bosh? | CELEBRATING THE LIFE AND POETRY OF A.R. AMMONS

a.R. Ammons wrote Bosh and Flapdoodle, his recently released posthumous collection, in a burst of sustained inspiration between Halloween and Christmas 1996. "Archie often wrote quickly, even furiously, and then he would rewrite," says Kenneth McClane '73, MFA '76, the W.E.B DuBois Professor of Literature and a former student of Ammons. "In both his poetry and his painting, he was truly prodigious, often completing numerous poems and paintings in the same day." For those who remember Archie Ammons and the give-and-take of his informal coffee club in the old Temple of Zeus, the book's title reveals the sardonic, deceptively self-mocking tone that camouflaged the complexity of a major poet. Ammons, who taught in the English department from 1964 to 1998, was the Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry and the winner of two National Book Awards, the Frost Medal, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Bollingen Prize. He died in 2001.

On April 17, friends, poets, and former students gathered at the Tompkins County Library to celebrate the publication of Bosh and Flapdoodle and Considering the Radiance: Essays on the Poetry of A.R. Ammons, edited by Roger Gilbert, professor of English at Cornell, and David Burak '67, MFA '80, professor of English at Santa Monica College. Radiance assembles twenty-two essays about Ammons's work, from his early poems of the 1950s to his late masterpieces, Garbage and Glare, and explores the personal side of a poet too often seen as abstract and intellectual. Burak and Gilbert led a panel that included Cornell professors McClane and Alice Fulton, MFA '82, and fellow writers Minfong Ho, Ingrid Arnesen, and Cory Brown. "That he produced a great deal is beyond doubt," says McClane. "That so much of it is of lasting value astonishes me. He was a true genius--and I miss him terribly."

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