Alumni Focus: Dale Pfost
Article reprinted from Fall 2003's Inside Physics [PDF].
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In the early eighties, when Dale Pfost (pronounced "post") was wrestling with the requirements to obtain a PhD in physics at Brown University, his advisor discovered on his desk a copy of A Guide to Venture Capital Sources. The professor noted the price—a few months' rent for grad student housing—and said, "You'll be lucky to ever get your money back."
"I hope," Dale adds as he tells the story, "that he's a shareholder now."
Dale has served as chairman, president, and chief executive officer of a biotech company, Orchid BioSciences ( ORCH on NASDAQ), since 1996. When he came on board, he was the company's second employee. He has since been joined by some 640 more, who work at eight locations in the U.S. and Europe; last year the company generated over $28 million in revenues and is slated to do over $60 million this year.
A fourth-generation Californian, Dale grew up in Los Altos, when it was still surrounded by apricot orchards, not multimillion-dollar houses. Both his parents attended Berkeley. His father, an electrical engineer, was one of five original inventors of the first commercial video tape recorder; he also invented the first disc recorder that enabled instant replays of sports events.
His father's vocation strongly influenced the family's recreational activities: together they built Heathkits, pinewood derby racers, an astronomical observatory in the Santa Cruz mountains, and “exceedingly, dangerously large” aluminum kites.
As Dale grew up, silicon took over the orchards. When he was 14, he started working after school and over the summers at a company that produced die and wafer inspection systems for the automation of microelectronics fabrication and testing. It was not a venture on the scale of Intel: at one point Dale constituted one-third of the work force, which gave him "a lot of experience in all facets of the business."
When he arrived at UCSB, his first inclination was to go into biology. His pleasure in the family engineering projects pointed to another possible direction, leading Dale to sign up as a physics major. He had never taken a physics course before, but was confident that "physics is the one science that gives you the ability to answer fundamental questions and to solve a huge variety of problems."
Before he had completed his first year of introductory work, his internal special-project detector emitted a strong signal. Having heard that the high-energy group was well funded, he approached the group's leader, David Caldwell. David told him to go talk to Rolly Morrison. Dale spent the next three and a half years helping to design, build, test, and install a calorimeter for an experiment to detect charmed particles.
“Working in the high-energy physics group changed my life. The department has earned its top ranking, and I am proud to be an alumnus.”
People who hear only about the results of high-energy physics research can get the notion that it's a pretty esoteric subject.
People who actually build successful high-energy physics experiments, however, work in the very real world. To look for phenomena that have never been seen before, you have to figure out how to build things that have never been built before.
Such undertakings rely on diverse talents. "I can't say enough about how positive my impressions were of the people in the machine shop, the technical support groups, the supply and purchasing teams while I was at UCSB," Dale says. "They were fantastic and have been a source of inspiration my whole career.”
Dale went on to graduate work in condensed-matter physics at Brown. The special project of that period began with a visit to a friend who was doing graduate work in pharmacology at Harvard. Dale began thinking about the laborious manual processing of liquid samples. Wasn't there a way to automate it?
While finishing his course work and completing the experimental part of his thesis, he conducted market research. Venture capital guide in hand, he and some friends founded a company and built the Biomek 1000, a programmable robot for performing repetitive tasks in biotechnology research laboratories.
For one nervous period of about a year he had to put his PhD on hold and run the company full time. His advisor was supportive but skeptical that Dale could return and finish his thesis. Beckman Instruments acquired the company in 1984. Remaining with Beckman, Dale traveled to Brown one week every month for about a year and completed his PhD.
After spending a couple of years as head of Beckman's robotics and automated chemistry systems group, Dale became managing director, president, and chief executive officer of a newly formed company in England. Its goal was to commercialize the expertise of Oxford University researchers in the role carbohydrates play in normal biological processes and in such threats to human health as AIDS, arthritis, and blood clots. Oxford GlycoSystems was the first commercial venture in the University's 800-year history. That company is now publicly traded in England.
Dale returned to the US in 1996. For the past six years, he has been chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Orchid BioSciences. This biotechnology company came into being because of individual variations in DNA known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Millions of these are the source of differences between you and the person in front of you in line at the supermarket—differences not only in appearance, but also in biological processes, such as the response of cells in your bodies to particular chemical compounds.
If such differences can be deciphered and codified, it could one day lead to a revolution in medicine: prescriptions for the drug that will be most effective, not just for a particular disease, but for a particular individual's unique metabolism. Orchid is on the cutting edge of developing the DNA tools necessary for such a revolution: vast databases, software, ultra-high throughput SNP scoring, and rapid throughput DNA analysis for pharmaceutical companies.
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Heroes: Edison, Hewlett and Packard, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, his parents: "People who took great initiative and blended science, technology, and commerce to create great things."
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Other passions: Spending time with his wife and son. Inventing recipes ("maybe one dish out of ten becomes approved for guests"). Travel. Reading history and biographies.
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"Initiative is a desperately scarce resource that has risks and rewards."
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Number of patents : 10.
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Orchid's website
-- Kate Metropolis
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