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 |  Stephen O'Connor is equal parts scientist, engineer and salesman.Armed with a PhD in chemistry from Caltech and more than a dozen jointly held patents, he helped start four companies, raising most of the seed money himself. His first venture made ultrafast optical sensors. His second. Clinical Microsensors, made DNA detection instruments he designed to quickly read the genetic makeup of plant and animal tis- sue; Motorola bought the company for $300 million. Money and experience gave O'Connorthe confidence to found Nanostream in Pasadena, CA, in 1999. It makes custom chips that analyze microscopic amounts of blood or other fluids, some of the first commercial products in the rapidly growing field ofmicrofluidics.With $11 million in funding. Nanostream markets the chips to pharmaceutical companies for drug discovery tests. Also in 1999, cyConnor founded C02,a profitable incubator company that has invested in 11 local scientific startups by outfitting their labs. O'Connor's Caltech advisor, John Baldeschwieler, says his ex-student is "playing an increasingly important role in the economic development of Pasadena."
| | O'CONNOR | | STEPHEN | | AGE 32 | | BIOTECHNOLOGY | | NANOSTREAM |
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| | |  Commuters in Japan are staring into their hands—and Kazuho Oku is to blame. Oku used personal digital assistants in high school but only experienced the Internet when he enrolled at the University of Tokyo as a geology major. He was struck by how much more useful the Internet could be—especially to idle commuters on subways and trains—if it were easily accessible over handheld devices. He was soon spending his time in the university's computer department, devising a way to compress Web pages and developing software to convert them into a format for handhelds. The result was Palmscape, one of the world's first Web browsers for handholds. Oku distributed Patmscape—intended for the Palm Pilot's Palm operating system—free over the Internet. Before finishing his studies, Oku was lured to llinx, a software company in Tokyo, where he developed his successor product, Xiino. It comes installed in a wide range of handholds and is a leading browser for Palm products in North America, Europe and Japan. Oku is now adding capabilities that allow corporate clients and individuals to write their own custom applications.
| | OKU | | KAZUHO | | AGE 24 | | INTERNET AND WEB | | ILINX |
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| | |  Soon after Watson and Crick found that DNA is made up of four subunits, including one called cytosine, scientists discovered a sexalled fifth subunit: methylated cytosine. Experiments in the 1990s showed that methylated cytosine acts as a switch that can turn a gene on or off. I But researchers had trouble distinguishing it from ordinary cytosine. Alexander Olek found an easy way to make it stand out, exposing . Relationships between the switch and disease. Oiek also developed lab techniques for quickly scouring large volumes of DNA for the switch. His work made him a pioneer in" epigenetics,' which explores how environmental factors alter DNA. Oiek, who dreams of helicoptering to a mountaintop to ski virgin snow, brings an adven- turesome attitude to his work. At 19 he started his first enterprise, which looked for genetic fea-tures of diseases common in South America. While he was finishing his doctorate, Oiek started Epigenomics in Berlin to advance his methylatlon work. With $35 million of investment capital, Epigenomics plans to market cancer detection tests that sense tumors' methylation signals.
| | OLEK | | ALEXANDER | | AGE 32 | | BIOTECHNOLOGY | | EPIGENOMICS |
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Source From: TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
June 2002
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產業智庫 
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