A Small Start

I have had an awful lot of fixations in my life. These were topics I was so intrigued by that I needed to know everything there was to know about them. My parents had a tremendous atlas, and I voraciously read through it for years, making lists of the various countries based on size, population, and all manner of other factors. When I discovered paleontology, I read an entire book series focused on some of the mysteries of the field. I picked through books categorizing dogs and fish, and even spent some time delving into architecture. I was transfixed by the macroscopic, both of natural and human construction.

But it wasn’t until I stumbled over the unseen that I found my calling. It didn’t take much to intrigue me. Reading “The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston introduced me to the scourge that is Ebola, and from then on, I couldn’t get enough. Dr. Pamela Nagami’s “Maneater”, Steven Berlin Johnson’s “The Ghost Map”, Molly Caldwell Crosby’s “The American Plague”, Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”, and numerous others all fed my interest, and quite rapidly, I became that creepy guy who talked way too much about pathogens.

So, I got my undergraduate degree in microbiology. And the rest is history…

…Well, not really. This was only a small start. It was really just a single organism entering my bloodstream and lying in wait for the opportune moment to turn into a full-blown infection, something that would alter my life substantially.

Of course, it wasn’t a singular moment. It happened in steps. My reading was a step, as was my degree. So was my year as a supervisor for IEH Laboratories, testing for food-borne pathogens in produce at Boskovich Farms. That year gave me a lot of insights into food microbiology, a field that, at the time, seemed a far cry from the interesting epidemiology of yellow fever, cholera and Ebola. But the more I learned about what I was doing, the more I understood: this is a serious problem. Here is a company that was being incredibly proactive for its time, using the services of a contract laboratory to detect some of the most insidious organisms around, ones that caused regular and very damaging outbreaks in one of the most advanced nations in the world. IEH was and is one of the biggest contract companies around, and they have played a huge role in making food safer.

And yet I couldn’t help but feel that they were trying to fight a raging fire with a garden hose. Using culturing and polymerase chain reaction (PCR), they could detect some of the most dangerous pathogens, but with technologies this dated, it seemed like uncovering a pathogen was as much the result of lucky sampling as anything else. My undergraduate degree had instilled in me just how rapidly our scientific tools were advancing, and yet this very important testing seemed mired in the past.

When I left that job behind and returned to academia, my experience kept nagging at me. My masters and PhD work built the foundations of an idea, but it wasn’t until I helped co-found Astrona Biotechnologies that everything seemed to coalesce.

Each of these moments in my life were small starts, beginnings on a path that could have led anywhere. I could have chosen to stay in academia, and feed my fixations with research. I could have gone to a major player in the science industry, feeding into a company that had had time to grow and mature. I could have chosen any of those paths. Instead, I chose to throw myself into entrepreneurship, pursuing a risky venture with brilliant scientists and engineers in an effort to make a product that will help protect people and companies from food-borne illness.

That choice was not random. I’ve come a long way from reading my parents’ atlas. I haven’t lost that fascination, but I’ve focused it, and turned it into something productive. Making a start up company involves living on the cutting edge of both science and business, and I’ve already felt some of the pain of being there. I’m certain I will feel a lot more pain as our company grows and evolves. But starting and growing a company is a learning process, one where we’re constantly processing information and applying it. And, just as with all of my fixations, I will be voracious.