When George Rathmann quit a safe job to join a corporate start-up in 1980, he could not have imagined the biomedical giant he would help create or the personal benefit that its first big product would bring.
Amgen has moved a long way fast since its humble origins as AMGen – or Applied Molecular Genetics. It began in a prefabricated concrete office building shared with an evangelical choir, in the obscure southern Californian town of Thousand Oaks, when its founders prayed with more faith than evidence that the new science of recombinant DNA could be turned swiftly into money.
