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April 4, 2001: Class Notes Class Notes Features: Carl Feldbaum '66 leads biotechs through Washington thicket Email your class notes...many secretaries have email. Check our online Class Secretaries Directory. Carl Feldbaum '66 leads biotechs through Washington thicket Carl B. Feldbaum ’66
majored in biology at Princeton, but he found life in the lab “isolating”
— so much so that it was almost three decades before he returned
to the subject. Now, following detours through law, politics, national
security, and intelligence, Feldbaum is back in a big way, serving
as president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) —
the lobbying and communications arm of the fast-growing, and often
controversial, biotech industry. As a political independent
who’s worked for a variety of Republican and Democratic bosses,
Feldbaum is well suited to steering the nation’s 1,300-plus
biotech companies through the Washington thicket. Feldbaum has been BIO’s
leader since its 1993 formation. Since then, BIO has grown from
16 people to 60, and from a $1.7 million budget to $25 million.
With the rapidly expanding industry facing plenty of divisive issues
— from human cloning to genetically modified foods to prescription
drug policy — Feldbaum spends at least 30 percent of his time
talking with reporters and broadcasters, often to parry attacks
made by the industry’s most passionate critics. (Feldbaum recently
named Lee Rawls ’66 — the former chief of staff to Senator
Bill Frist ’74 — as his chief lobbyist.) Ironically, the scientific
advances in his field have come so fast that not even Feldbaum manages
to keep up. “You can no longer get away with knowing just molecular
biology,” he says. “The field has converged with information
technology, engineering, robotics, and optics. I can probably understand
about 20-something percent of the articles in Science or Cell.” Over the past year, BIO’s
agenda began to hit home in a personal way. After taking a biotech
diagnostic test, Feldbaum — a dedicated runner and swimmer
— was diagnosed with a presymptomatic form of prostate cancer.
He underwent successful surgery and returned to work three weeks
later. Feldbaum urges continued
efforts to chart a course through the moral challenges of the new
technologies. “We’re going to have to have rules of the
road for handling genetic information,” he says, “so that
people are not afraid to take diagnostic tests that enable them
to get diagnosed like I did.” By Louis Jacobson ’92 Louis Jacobson covers lobbying for National Journal. |
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