Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 7 The Internship

Seventy summers after the lucky strike, I was a Princeton undergrad and a summer intern at Jay Orrix’s Sandbox Institute. Jenk’s son Jay founded it and then funded it with exit proceeds of his first company, Agrigene, $600 million worth of well-told dream that failed to deliver on its promise. There had also been one tangential but commercially important discovery, a serendipitous insight that became fructuse, or Fruct2, the revolutionary fat-burning sweetener used in 2Sweet brand products, whose salacious slogan, “Fruct2: Without it, you’re fruct!” was plastered wherever eyeballs might see it. Sadly for Agrigene’s investors, the commercial significance was for a customer. Under the research contract, the company received a single milestone payment for the discovery, not ongoing royalties. That infusion allowed the young company to keep moving forward without having to raise cash. “Your first deal is your worst deal, but it’s also your best deal,” Jay said, shrugging off thoughts of what might have been. The institute had no ostensible purpose and was, as the name implied, Jay Orrix’s sandbox.

Undergrads like me wanted summer jobs, paid or unpaid internships, to test out a field of study with no more commitment than the time spent, to learn something, to get outside our own social fish bowls, to make, we hoped, a little money, and to polish our résumés for grad school. Should we work on a vaccine production line in Valley Forge or in a mouse lab in Maine? Should we delve deep into the basic science of molecular biology, or moby as it’s known in the vernacular, or should we try to translate the findings at moby’s frontier, pushing them over the boundary between science and medicine? And then there were startups, too. A summer startup gig might lead to stock options and riches later, or more likely nothing at all except for war stories and bragging rights.

I’m often asked why that two-syllable portmanteau, moby, has survived selection. But it’s a lost story. Horace Freeland Judson, the great chronicler of molecular biology, wrote in one his notebooks, “Moby! I’ve hunted, and I’ve hunted, and I’ve hunted, and I’ve found an explanation that is wondrous, but this margin is too narrow to contain it.” And then he took the secret to his grave. François Jacob said to me, “Jais pas. Mais, pourquoi utiliser huit lorsque deux va faire?” Fred Sanger told me the same, “I don’t know. But why use eight [syllables] when two will do?” And then there are the other possibilities. Mobio? Yuck. Mobi—with a hard /I/ and without the ‘o’—sounds like the phoneme amputee it is. When the ‘i’ is pronounced /E/, as in shriek, that sounds Ok, but to make it American, you’d spell it like Americans already do. Ergo, moby. Time to stop this blubbering.

Jay had left Princeton with some fanfare a decade earlier, settling in New Hampshire because it was home and “I like the politics and the pizza,” he said. He established himself as one of Portsmouth’s rising stars in biotech. Among those few, only he could claim to be an entrepreneur playing on the national stage. Even though the Institute wasn’t a startup, it got you within reach of a capital-P Player, and who knew where that would lead? I applied there and got the job.