At the University of Iceland Medical School in Reykjavik, Stefánsson initially wanted to pursue psychiatry but then switched to neurology. After graduating, Stefánsson went to medical school-following the lead of his best friend because he couldn’t decide what to do next. He entered the College of Reykjavik in 1966 and majored in math. We were encouraged to read good literature, to write, and to be creative.” Stefánsson also enjoyed the outdoors, fishing with his father in the summer and riding horses. “Our family was economically not at all privileged, but we had cultural privileges. Iceland was a relatively poor country then. You free yourself from the necessity of beginning with a hypothesis, which I thought was very liberating. “When I was growing up, popular writers in Iceland had the status pop stars have elsewhere,” he says. Stefánsson was a prolific reader and aspired to become a writer too. His father wrote biographies and published an autobiography of his early life, growing up in an Icelandic fishing village, that “straddled fiction and nonfiction,” Stefánsson says. Stefánsson’s father was a radio journalist, writer, and then a member of Iceland’s parliament, while his mother stayed home with the kids.Īt a young age, Stefánsson was more interested in books and writing than in science. He doesn’t recall being starved of his parents’ attention, although that is how his eldest sister remembers it, he says. “I was in the worst position in the order of children that you can think of, the child that tends to get the least attention,” he says. He was the second youngest of five children. Stefánsson was born and grew up in Reykjavik. “I thought that would take four years,” he says, “but instead it took almost 20.” Starting with books “I was just this eccentric man from Iceland who was telling potential investors his story.” Stefánsson moved back to Iceland in 1996 and began to build deCODE from scratch. ![]() “I didn’t know much about how to raise funding,” he says. Pitching this idea, he convinced seven companies to give him a total of $12 million in the span of six weeks. While his goal was to find genetic variants at the root of common diseases, he sold his idea to investors by proposing that deCODE would turn a profit by finding novel drug targets for pharmaceutical companies and by using human genetics data to identify subpopulations that would be more likely to respond to certain treatments-what is today called precision medicine. ![]() “I realized that to make a significant contribution to the field of genetics, the scope was too large to fit into academic research and to obtain the proper grant funding.” So Stefánsson went to venture capitalists in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to convince them to fund his company. “You can look for variants without prior ideas of what causes the disease, so you free yourself from the necessity of beginning with a hypothesis, which I thought was very liberating.”Īfter that day, there was no turning back, Stefánsson says. Still, he realized that such genetic analyses were the only way to probe the nature of human diseases in a model-independent way. Stefánsson was a seasoned molecular biology and protein biochemistry researcher with a focus on neuroscience, but he had never done human population genetics studies.
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