‘I would like Chapel Hill
to be an even better place
for people to take risks.
Most of the great breakthroughs
come from crazy ideas that probably
shouldn’t have been tried.’
Holden Thorp
brief time as chemistry chair and dean.
He has been heavily involved in aggressive faculty searches, not necessarily waiting
to see what kind of budget he has. “If we
wait for budget, we might be behind the
timetable because it’s October already, and
that’s late in the academic year to start
moving somebody,” Gil said. So the college
initiated searches early last year, about
when Thorp became dean.
Searches that traditionally concentrated
on senior faculty now often focus on rising
stars in the assistant and associate professor
ranks while established heavyweights juggle
offers from better-endowed private universities and the counters from their home
schools. This often is a tougher job but,
Thorp believes, a more realistic tack.
“We approach everything as, ‘We can do
that,’” Gil said, “trying to find creative
solutions to things that didn’t appear to
have solutions.”
Thorp will view things from a higher
altitude now. But when he was reminded
that as dean he was asked what he’d do
with a $100 million gift that could be used
for anything, he said he wouldn’t change
his answer now. (He would endow 200
doctoral fellowships, or provide $5 million
per year for faculty compensation and
research support, or add 100 junior faculty
in strategic areas, including expansion of
the honors program and first-year seminars.)
“There is a lot of talk about what we
should be doing as a public university, and
I personally, even though I haven’t been
around here that long, I think that saying
we do research and teaching and service is
absolutely OK. I think that trying to
rephrase these things is not what we should
be focusing on, but trying to make these
things indistinguishable.”
A prominent part of the buzz about
Thorp on the campus is the rather obvious
prospect that, at his age, he could stay in the
job well past the typical eight or 10 years.
“Yeah, it’s up to me to make sure I succeed enough that I have that opportunity,”
he said. “But yeah, I think having enough
runway to really do some things is a pretty
exciting idea. I think there are some role
models out there. John Casteen certainly
has had a long run at Virginia, and I think
that’s been a huge help to them, and I
think certainly Derek Bok had clearly a
very long run at Harvard, and Wake Forest
— they really moved up with a long-term
president as well.
“So I do think there are examples out
there that suggest that one can do it, but
you know it’s one day and one problem at
a time. So it’s exciting to think about being
able to do some things over more than a
decade. But there are a lot of immediate
problems that have got to get worked on
too, so it’s a balance.”
DAVID E. BROWN ’ 75 is senior associate
editor of the Review.
The Scientific
Entrepreneur
In 1996, three years after he came to
UNC to teach, Holden Thorp and
others founded Xanthon Inc. The
University helped develop its business
plan and choose investors. Based on
Thorp’s invention, it set out to develop a
diagnostic kit for genetically detecting
cancers and infectious agents. As Thorp
explained for the Review six years ago,
most tests for new drugs involve looking
to see what potential drugs do to a particular molecule suspected of playing a
role in disease. Xanthon’s technology
enabled these experiments on whole cells
to see how individual genes are affected
by a candidate drug.
Xanthon did not make it. Starting
with plans for an 80,000-square-foot
building and 100 employees, its product
rollout encountered technical problems,
and by 2002 it was shut down.
In a presentation Thorp made for a
seminar on technology transfer, he told his
audience, “You do not merely want to be
considered just the best of the best. You
want to be considered the only ones that
do what you do.” It was a quote from
Jerry Garcia, late of the Grateful Dead.
Thorp left them with his “famous last
words”: “I don’t really care about making
money. I just want people to use the technology,” and added, “If this is really true,
then don’t start a company; license the
technology nonexclusively for a reasonable
price and let the market decide if it wants
to use it.”
“When Xanthon collapsed financially,
I learned two things,” he said recently.
“One, it wasn’t the end of the world. The
people who lost their jobs found new
ones, many of them are wildly successful
today, and I went on to do other things
in the venture area. The second was that
just having a great idea does not guarantee financial success. The Xanthon IP is
still licensed and protecting a marketed
product, but that wasn’t a guarantor of
business success.”
He says a second company spun from
his research,Viamet Pharmaceuticals, “is
doing well.” Viamet is looking for new
drugs for metalloenzymes for use in infectious disease, inflammation and oncology.
