They called him “job killer.”
Protestors rallied, German newspapers heaped scorn, and researchers at international pharmaceutical firm Hoechst Marion Roussel openly reviled the new, American executive vice president who had been brought in to turn their corporation around.
Still, nothing could have prepared Dr. Frank Douglas for the experience of pulling into the company’s Frankfurt, Germany, corporate campus one early morning to find a green lawn filled with white crosses.
“There was a chill down my spine,” Douglas recalls. “I was never so scared in my life.” He’d been a black man in America during racially charged times. The Klu Klux Klan implication was immediate, even if, he says, the Germans later told him they had erected the crosses because they wanted to demonstrate that he was killing research.
Corporate officials were scared as well. They escorted Douglas into the office that morning and announced they were beefing up security measures. “[They] squirreled me away for a week with a bodyguard,” he says. After seven days, Douglas came back to work. The bodyguard stayed for months.
None of it deterred Douglas from his mission to streamline research and development at Hoechst Marion Roussel. He became fluent in German within six months as a way to show his staff that, because he was asking for change from them, he would change as well. Eventually, the protests dissipated and Douglas’ leadership showed results.
Even 13 years later, the memory of all those white crosses still puts a slight tremble in Douglas’ steady voice. At the time, his family had been an ocean away in the United States, and he admits wrestling with uncertainty. “I did ask myself, What am I doing here?”
Douglas’ ability to stay focused is one of his greatest strengths, according to former colleague Richard Markham. “He’s an excellent scientist, works extremely hard, obviously very bright,” Markham says. “[He’s] one of the most honest people I’ve ever met, and he is extremely principled, and no matter what the consequences, he does not vary from them.”
This sense of direction most recently led Douglas to Akron, where he is president and CEO of the new Austen BioInnovation Institute. The institute hopes to build on the region’s strength in health care and education, particularly its background in polymer research, orthopedics and wound care.
Five Akron-area institutions — Akron Children’s Hospital, Summa Health System, Akron General Health System, the University of Akron, and the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Pharmacy — joined with the Knight Foundation to create the BioInnovation Institute. A total of $80 million has been committed over five years by the state of Ohio, Summit County, the city of Akron and other private, foundation and government sources.
Douglas is the one who’s charged with making that investment pay off.
He certainly doesn’t need the Akron job. He was a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, chief scientific adviser of Bayer Healthcare and a senior partner of Puretech Ventures. He served as executive vice president, chief scientific officer and member of the board of management of Aventis. He has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and chairman of the executive committee of the Science and Regulatory section of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association.
Douglas and his wife of 43 years, Lynnet, were living in New Jersey. They were expecting their first grandchild who would be living nearby. So why come to Akron? Douglas smiles. He does that a lot as he talks about his new job. Then he responds: “It’s a question my colleagues in Boston and Cambridge have asked repeatedly.”
Even though his wife will spend most of her time in New Jersey while Douglas charts a future for the BioInnovation Institute, he sees the job as his chance to create a personal legacy.
“When I think about why we are here, we are here to contribute to our fellow man,” he says, “to make a better world for those coming behind us.”
>> Richard Markham met Douglas in 1993 when Markham was recruited to be president and COO of Marion Merrell Dow Inc. Douglas was executive vice president of research and development for the corporation at the time. When the American company merged with a German business to become Hoechst Marion Roussel a few years later, the men forged a strong friendship while enduring the protests in Frankfurt, Germany.
“It was very, very difficult,” Markham recalls. Following the merger, Douglas says the German employees were reluctant to accept him and Markham as their new leaders. The pair’s ultimate goal was to cut drug development times from nine-to-15 years to six-to-nine years. Douglas was clear from the start that such streamlining would lead to job cuts.
“There was a lot of opposition, and most of it was directed at me,” Douglas says. He attributes that to the fact that the company was downsizing and that he and Markham were perceived as two Americans against thousands of Germans. It’s kind of funny, Douglas chuckles, because he isn’t American; he is Guyanese.
“I grew up without a dad,” he says. “I grew up very poor.” He was so poor that friends of his mother provided the family shelter when they needed a place to stay. Church was an important part of his early life, too. Douglas was a boy preacher; he met his wife in church and ran the Youth of Christ movement in Guyana at age 19.
A friend of his mother financed Douglas’ education at the Cambridge Academy, which won him a scholarship to Queens College in Guyana. He came to the United States at age 20 as a Fulbright fellow, two weeks before Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington.
“I experienced a lot of discrimination in the United States,” Douglas recalls. Some of it happened at church. He didn’t understand why the same people who came to Guyana as missionaries weren’t welcoming black people to their churches. Douglas says those early experiences made him decide at age 23 to only attend church for weddings and baptisms and to live his life based on principles.
After studying in the United States, Douglas returned to Guyana to assess his career options. His life there came to an abrupt end in 1975 when he refused a job offered to him by Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. Burnham was an autocrat who led Guyana from 1957 to 1985, and it wasn’t the first time Douglas and Burnham had been at odds.
“He had invited me one Sunday to come to his office and meet with him,” Douglas recalls, of an invitation he received before moving to the United States in 1963. Church service ran late that day, and when he finally arrived, an associate of Burnham asked why Douglas was showing such a “lack of respect.”
“I told him I was doing the work of someone higher than him,” Douglas says.
The snub must have lingered. Twelve years later Burnham offered Douglas a job running a leather-tanning factory. The position made no sense. Douglas was two years into medical school at the time and says he believes Burnham knew full well he’d turn down the position. “[It] clearly was an attempt to banish me,” Douglas says. “I never expressed allegiance to him.”
Douglas was asked to leave Guyana — not something to ignore in the South American country where dissidents had been killed. He did not return until well after Burnham’s death. As he talks about that experience now, Douglas says he has never been particularly impressed with authority. “That’s why I don’t take my [own] authority very seriously.”
Instead, collaboration has been key to his career success, just as it has been to the startup of the BioInnovation Institute. That similarity might help explain the “immediate chemistry” William Considine, chairman of the BioInnovation Institute’s board, says was evident between Douglas and the board when he first interviewed in Akron.
“There’s an inner peace about the man,” says Considine, who is also president and CEO of Akron Children’s Hospital. “He treats everyone with enormous respect. … He’s a transformational leader, there’s no ‘ands,’ ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ about it.”
“He listens, he wants to get contributions from people,” adds Robert Langer, who first met Douglas about 12 years ago while chairing the FDA Science Board. Langer, internationally renowned for his research and innovations in medical technology and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, talked with Douglas about the Akron position early on in the search for someone to lead it.
“It doesn’t hurt that I enjoy a challenge,” Douglas says. “I’m probably a builder by nature, a synthesizer.”
In 2007, Douglas faced a very different kind of challenge when he decided to resign from faculty and administrative positions at MIT where, two years earlier, he had launched the institute’s Center for Biomedical Innovation. Many media outlets reported that Douglas resigned in protest of MIT’s decision not to grant tenure to James Sherley, who had gone on a hunger strike earlier in 2007.
“James Sherley was not the reason I left MIT,” Douglas quickly notes when asked about his resignation.
But Sherley’s claims that the tenure appeal process was tainted by “racism and conflict of interest” and the public’s reaction to those claims did prompt Douglas to suggest MIT hire an external panel to “evaluate and make recommendations to improve the environment in which minority faculty at MIT work.” MIT’s leaders said they would rather not involve an outside mediator.
“I began to wonder whether there was a lack of integrity at the highest levels of the institute, or simply a lack of care in expressing the institute’s intention,” Douglas wrote in an article printed in The Scientist in July 2007. “I concluded that it was not an issue of lack of capability, but one of lack of will to deal with a problem that had clearly polarized minority faculty and the larger MIT community.”
Looking back at the situation now, Douglas shakes his head. MIT’s leaders “kept focusing on tenure and the right of the university” as they tried to convince him to stay. Also perplexing to Douglas were his MIT colleagues who came into his office, closed the door and said, “Frank, you’re right,” then returned to their jobs without ever publicly voicing their support.
>> One of Douglas’ first goals at the BioInnovation Institute is to identify initial projects and hire leaders for each of five “centers of excellence.” Although Douglas will make the final hiring decisions, he will do so based on job descriptions and interviews conducted by five committees that have been working together for the past eight to 10 months.
Douglas and the board have also identified three potential sites for the BioInnovation Institute’s permanent facility, which will house administrative offices, the Center for Healthcare Training, the Center for Clinical Trials and the Center for Community Outreach to the Medically Underserved. All potential sites are existing structures that would be modified.
The labs that house the Center for Biomaterials and Medicine and the Medical Device Development Center will be distributed as appropriate among the four Akron-based partners. Douglas doesn’t anticipate this will be a difficult process, even given the inherent competition between institutions. He says each of the institutions’ leaders has agreed to a selection process and criteria. Because of that and his experience, Douglas says “political horse trading” won’t be a problem.
The institute’s community outreach center has already agreed to assume the costs and leadership of the Access to Care program, which connects lower-income, uninsured working Summit County residents to health care services volunteered by local providers. As part of that agreement, the number of program clients will double from 1,500 to 3,000. Douglas also wants to start a research component to examine health delivery system outcomes. “Are there things that we can do to keep this population well?” he asks.
Within 12 months, Douglas wants to have all of his directors in place, to have clearly identified projects happening at each center and to show that the member institutions are working together. Within the next five years, he expects BioInnovation will spin out at least two or three small companies, snare a number of National Institutes of Health grants and gain national recognition.
If done right, Considine says the institute could one day lead to the creation of a projected 2,400 jobs and bring 30 to 45 companies and triple the number of clinical trials (and the money that comes with them) to Akron.
Ten years from now, Douglas envisions a BioInnovation campus “humming with post-graduate students from around the world.” The only question in his mind seems to be whether he’ll be there to see it through.
Douglas says that when he was interviewing for the position, he was asked, “Do you have 10 good years in you to do this?” He told the board that it should identify his successor by his fourth year on the job. Markham chuckles when he hears that. “If he leaves in four years, it will take him about a week and a half to find the next thing he’s going to do. … He’s so engrossed in his work.”
That fits Douglas. When asked what he does to relax, he says, “I think … I work.”
It’s work that remains grounded by his principles, and from time to time, he’s reminded of the positive effect that approach has had on others as well. In August, Douglas was invited to the National Institutes of Health to do grand rounds, a medical-education ritual during which medical experts present information to students, residents and doctors.
At the end of the session, he was approached by a doctor who had once been his student. “[He told me] ‘You never shouted, you never screamed. You always treated us with respect,’ ” Douglas says recalling the younger doctor’s compliment. “I was quite touched by that.”