of one of the historic oyster farms in the area, the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. Like the ranches that form a patchwork over much of the nearby land, the oyster farm in the park’s estuary was supposed to have its 40-year lease renewed in perpetuity as part of the original master agreement for the national seashore. Last decade, however, it became increasingly clear the National Park Service wanted to shut the oyster farm down, citing various environmental reasons.
First approached by a county supervisor, Goodman volunteered his services analyzing the park service reports. He unearthed what he saw as a series of mischaracterizations and other problems that led him to argue in an amicus curae brief about what he considered blatant misconduct by the NPS—including the alteration of data in an independent consultant’s report that didn’t support the park service’s agenda.
“There was falsification of data, as bad as you can imagine,” Goodman says. “People should go to jail for what happened.”
He’s not the only one who has used blunt language; in a letter to then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the NPS of serious misconduct.
Goodman and the oyster farm’s allies argued, among other things, that the business of oysters was in fact good for the estuary; the bivalves act as filters in an area where runoff from the local ranches—which the park service had (and has) no intention of shutting down—adds feces to the water.
The arguments were for naught; the oyster farm, deemed by the NPS to be incompatible with its surrounding designated wilderness area, was shut down for good at the end of 2014 after a series of court decisions and the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the case.
At the time Goodman got involved in the Drakes Bay fight, he had already thought a lot about water contamination, analyzing a case involving another local oyster farm where a bunch of customers got sick. The way water agencies measured contamination—fecal coliform tests—was “19th century technology,” Goodman says, and he set off “on a quest” to find something better. That led him to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who had built a chip that could identify and measure bacterial genomes. At first, Goodman spun out a company, PhyloTech, that aimed to bring genetic analysis to pollution problems. It solved a case in Malibu, CA, where a beach closure turned out to be due to bird poop, not the locals’ septic systems.
But soon he began believing there was no broader business. “We should be looking to measure the real thing,” Goodman says—the actual level of microbes in the environment. Other than the city of Malibu and some enthusiasts at the Environmental Protection Agency, “no one wanted to know. Everyone’s happy to use old measurements.”
“It wouldn’t be a biotech business until Congress passed a law to mandate knowing what’s really there,” says Goodman.
PhyloTech soon pivoted and became Second Genome, which is using iterations of the technology to understand the microbial profiles in the guts of people with chronic diseases. It designs small-molecule drugs to treat them. Its lead program, for inflammatory bowel disease, is now in human testing.
Second Genome has made progress, but Goodman looks back on the PhyloTech and oyster farm experiences—watching “science get abused” in a policy or regulatory setting—and came away “cynical and discouraged.”
“I once thought one party were the good guys when it comes to science,” he says. That said, he is an science advisor to the Democratic administration of Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown, and he acknowledges that the intersection of science and policy will continue to expand in the state, and elsewhere, as water rights become ever more contentious.
Goodman says technological solutions to water conservation will likely spring new biotech businesses to life, but he’s not aiming his venture acumen in that direction. On the Barinaga Ranch, however, there are trillions of microbes his wife is putting to work every day in her award-winning cheeses. (In fact, she and a Harvard microbiologist are currently working on an analysis of those cheesy microbial communities, Goodman says.)
There are biotech cowboys who don’t get all tangled up in new ranch technology or dueling analyses. Brad Vale recently retired after more than three decades at Johnson & Johnson, most recently leading J&J’s venture group. His main title these days is chief cowboy of the Bella Vista Ranch & Cattle Company, which is also his home in the hills northeast of San Jose, CA. It’s “about 52 miles from Union Square,” Vale reckons, showing how near and yet how far he now is from the annual healthcare dealmaking bacchanal that takes place in San Francisco every January.
Vale and his wife are both trained veterinarians and now spend their time tending about 30 cattle on the ranch. He is well aware of the nitrogen content of the various grasses his cattle forage, and how California’s sparse rains affect that mix. But he says he’s lucky; he’s in a microclimate slightly wetter than most of the Bay Area.
He also only keeps cattle at his little ranch—“goats and sheep tend to start disappearing to the mountain lions”—and unlike Yednock, he eats what he raises, although rules only permit him to sell whole animals. (The local butcher drives up and does the partitioning.)
When asked how he’s applied wisdom from his career, he admits he keeps things pretty simple. His favorite new toy is a paintball gun he uses to shoot a common insecticide at his cattle. A direct hit on the shoulder, and a splatter of ivormectin, protects the entire animal from bugs.
Meanwhile, Ted Yednock in Nevada and Corey Goodman on the California coast have taken up second lives that, perhaps, aren’t second lives after all. Taking on big projects and big fights, they’re not actually trading in anything or making any escapes, at least not the way most people would envision as life after work. Even so, Yednock’s view across Diamond Valley, or Goodman’s view down the hill from Barinaga Ranch to Tomales Bay and beyond to the Pacific, beats anything a suburban lab building or an office in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood can offer.
If Yednock and Frazer need an escape from their escape, they have that, too. In 2007, they bought 480 acres of High Sierra land near California’s Mono Lake that were being used as a junkyard, and transferred rights to a local land trust. Now cleared out, there’s not much besides sagebrush. Yednock and Frazer have the option to build a small dwelling on the land, but they haven’t yet. “We’ve been kind of busy since then, so it sits and remains in a wonderfully natural state,” Yednock says. “And we may leave it that way.”
