pursue any intellectual interest of her choosing.
Her father had drilled into her the notion that she should live a purposeful life. During his career in public service, Chris Holmes had overseen humanitarian efforts like the 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which more than one hundred thousand Cubans and Haitians migrated to the United States. There were pictures around the house of him providing disaster relief in war-torn countries. The message Elizabeth took away from them is that if she wanted to truly leave her mark on the world, she would need to accomplish something that furthered the greater good, not just become rich. Biotechnology offered the prospect of achieving both. She chose to study chemical engineering, a field that provided a natural gateway to the industry.
The face of Stanford’s chemical engineering department was Channing Robertson. Charismatic, handsome, and funny, Robertson had been teaching at the university since 1970 and had a rare ability to connect with his students. He was also by far the hippest member of the engineering faculty, sporting a graying blond mane and showing up to class in leather jackets that made him seem a decade younger than his fifty-nine years.
Elizabeth took Robertson’s Introduction to Chemical Engineering class and a seminar he taught on controlled drug-delivery devices. She also lobbied him to let her help out in his research lab. Robertson agreed and farmed her out to a Ph.D. student who was working on a project to find the best enzymes to put in laundry detergent.
Outside of the long hours she put in at the lab, Elizabeth led an active social life. She attended campus parties and dated a sophomore named JT Batson. Batson was from a small town in Georgia and was struck by how polished and worldly Elizabeth was, though he also found her guarded. “She wasn’t the biggest sharer in the world,” he recalls. “She played things close to the vest.”
Over winter break of her freshman year, Elizabeth returned to Houston to celebrate the holidays with her parents and the Dietzes, who flew down from Indianapolis. She’d only been in college for a few months, but she was already entertaining thoughts of dropping out. During Christmas dinner, her father floated a paper airplane toward her end of the table with the letters “P.H.D.” written on its wings.
Elizabeth’s response was blunt, according to a family member in attendance: “No, Dad, I’m not interested in getting a Ph.D., I want to make money.”
That spring, she showed up one day at the door of Batson’s dorm room and told him she couldn’t see him anymore because she was starting a company and would have to devote all her time to it. Batson, who had never been dumped before, was stunned but remembers that the unusual reason she gave took some of the sting out of the rejection.
Elizabeth didn’t actually drop out of Stanford until the following fall after returning from a summer internship at the Genome Institute of Singapore. Asia had been ravaged earlier in 2003 by the spread of a previously unknown illness called severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and Elizabeth had spent the summer testing patient specimens obtained with old low-tech methods like syringes and nasal swabs. The experience left her convinced there must be a better way.
When she got back home to Houston, she sat down at her computer for five straight days, sleeping one or two hours a night and eating from trays of food her mother brought her. Drawing from new technologies she had learned about during her internship and in Robertson’s classes, she wrote a patent application for an arm patch that would simultaneously diagnose medical conditions and treat them.
Elizabeth caught up on sleep in the family car while her mother drove her from Texas to California to start her sophomore year. As soon as she was back on campus, she showed Robertson and Shaunak Roy, the Ph.D. student she was assisting in his lab, her proposed patent.
In court testimony years later, Robertson recalled being impressed by her inventiveness: “She had somehow been able to take and synthesize these pieces of science and engineering and technology in ways that I had never thought of.” He was also struck by how motivated and determined she was to see her idea through. “I never encountered a student like this before of the then thousands of students that I had talked” to, he said. “I encouraged her to go out and pursue her dream.”
Shaunak was more skeptical. Raised by Indian immigrant parents