Frank Bullock BSP ’58, MA, PhD, blazed his own trail through the world of pharmaceutical research and development. As a researcher at Arthur D. Little, Abbott Laboratories, and Schering Plough, Bullock’s career touched on some of the most exciting biotech developments of the last century. We sat down with him to learn more.

I understand that you planned to go into retail pharmacy, but revised your plans due to a sudden change in circumstances. Tell us about that.

Retail pharmacy was my father’s plan for me. He had hoped that I would take over the family business, which was a variety store featuring packaged medicines and other convenience items. Unfortunately, reality intervened in the form of post-war urban renewal. Buildings in the neighborhood were knocked down, roads were rerouted, and it didn’t make much sense for a bright young man, namely me, to stay on that route. So I diverted from my father’s plan in 1958.

How did pharmaceutical research appear on your radar? What made you think research would be a good fit?

I was taking an organic chemistry course during my sophomore year taught by Charlie Bauer; in the course of listening to his lectures, I became fascinated by the simple insight that the molecules he was drawing on the blackboard had shape and three-dimensional form. That insight captivated me.

Tell me about the early days of your career at Arthur D. Little. What were you investigating? What were some of the “big questions” in the field?

That was a big turning point in my life; I worked on a project that still has currency today. You have to remember that this was the 50s, we had a war on with Korea and it was a period of inflamed passions. So one of my first projects was to work for the Army on a group of classified compounds. Next, I moved on to malaria drugs, when the Army found itself fighting in Vietnam with troops who possessed no resistance to malaria. I got that contract by coincidence, because my PhD thesis happened to focus on promising malaria-active compounds, some of which had the backing of Louis Fieser, a renowned expert of the 20th century in the field of organic chemistry. I spent a year doing post-doctoral work at the Harvard Medical School. The reason I made that choice was because there was a new technology which I thought was going to be crucial for new drug development, NMR. In 1963 NMR was a new and novel thing. The surrounding technology matters a great deal—I went from looking at the synthesis of compounds to physical compounds. I wasted a year in Berkeley in the late 60’s, where the Berkeley riots happened, and I can’t point to any achievements at all stemming from that year.

After a while you moved on to Abbott Laboratories and Schering Plough. Tell us a little about your roles at those two companies.

Abbott Laboratories, who had recruited me out of Alfred D. Little, had an interest in a particular class of compound in the area of the central nervous system. They picked up the LSD/marijuana project briefly, but had a very eccentric pharmacologist working on the project, and his eccentricities led to the project getting canceled. I was section head of a group of protein chemists who ultimately delivered a product that allowed me to take advantage of a new biotechnology that was beginning to appear in the late 60s: cloning. Cloning technology came on the scene just as protein chemistry became more accessible.

At the time, Abbott was still making up its mind what it wanted to become when it grew up—it’s now called AbbVie and it’s doing much better than it was when I was there. However, my experience working on protein chemistry at Abbott ultimately led me to the biotech wing at Schering Plough. That was a rather big career move. I had been playing around in Berkeley, and Schering Plough’s people spotted me and recruited me out of Abbott as a vice president of drug discovery. I had operating responsibility across the board of drug synthesis at Schering Plough, which included interferon.

At the time, Schering Plough had partnered with some sharp guys from MIT and Harvard who were working on protein chemistry for a company called Biogen. I was just following people and technology around. (Like Charles Weissman, who was working in Geneva and cloned interferon. Another player who was very active in the cloning race was named Sidney Petska. We had no interaction with him whatsoever, but he was extremely crucial.) I dusted off my protein chemistry from years ago, and voila, I had a protein chemistry group. Eventually, these nascent technologies which had first appeared in my life at Abbott led to alpha-interferon, the first protein product approved anywhere in the world to treat cancer. It was driven by the cloners, not the chemists.

Now, a point of pride. Is there a special career accomplishment that you look back on with particular pleasure?

Schering Plough, having a winner in their plans with alpha-interferon, and sensing a lot of interest in the world around biotech, decided to make an acquisition. I wrote a strategic plan for SP’s biotech enterprise; that plan was contradicted by a group of inside players who wanted to simply let the scientists have their heads—the idea being, “they’re all brilliant people, something good will happen.” What we should be doing was clear—how we should be doing it was less clear, and there were multiple battles for years. But my plan led to the acquisition of a Palo Alto area company called DNAX because it had multiple Nobel Prize winners and prize-winning consultants. Schering’s desire to be a player in biotech led to acquiring DNAX, and I was charged with pulling that act together. It was a scientific success.

Can you point to any MCPHS professors whose lessons or advice were particularly helpful as you charted your path?

One of my favorites was Charlie Bauer, who I already mentioned. I was a low-probability candidate for going to school at Harvard; the way they were set up for incoming graduate students was that you had to pass a qualifying exam in four categories of chemistry: physical, inorganic, organic, and analytical chemistry, which was taught at the college by Jim Michaels. He could not have known that he produced a graduate student who scored highest for the analytical qualifying exam, among all the graduate students coming in that year to Harvard. That must have impressed them, coming out of a small pharmacy school. They offered me a teaching fellowship, so I got my tuition reimbursed.

If you were to advise a newly-minted graduate considering a career in research and new drug development, what would you want him or her to know?

Only that it is intensely competitive, because there’s so much money involved. With that as a reality, my advice would be: work hard. Work very hard. Because other people are very competitive, and you’re going to see them downstream, and you need to be prepared. It’s glamorous—curing diseases with simple molecules, it’s nearly magical. But it is damn hard work.