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He spent the next two years keeping that window open. A new federal rule allowing tax breaks for investments in research helped lure prospective backers. Sales climbed, the stock rose, and Greene launched another offering that sold 1.4 million shares at $26.75. Today Hybritech produces 40% of all the monoclonal antibody products on the market, notably diagnostic kits to test for allergies, pregnancy, prostate cancer and thyroid deficiencies. The company's sales went from $6.9 million in 1983 to an estimated $14.5 million in 1984, and its profit for 1984 will be $1.3 million.
Looking back, Greene is not sure he would have taken so many risks if he had known how big they would be. But he adds, "When you're doing something like this, you have to keep charging at it, telling yourself it's going to work. Somehow it does."
Bill Lindsey
"I'm cleaning it up for you"
The problem: one of those hopeless disaster areas known as a ghetto, an inner city, a slum. This particular one, on the northwest side of Fort Lauderdale, bore the cheerful name of Citrus Park, but it was a sullen collection of two dozen four-family stucco houses, dilapidated, garbage-strewn, crime-ridden.
Raised as an Army brat, the son of a major, Bill Lindsey was 25 and wore a beard and ponytail when he first came to Citrus Park twelve years ago. The civil rights movement had convinced him that, "you know, you're supposed to be doing something." So he had joined VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps, which assigned him to Fort Lauderdale, just to "observe." A passing policeman questioned him about why he was living in a tough black neighborhood and added a warning that he would "be dead in three days."
Lindsey joined a group of four tenants trying to organize a rent strike, using their rent money to make repairs. One of the first steps was to install security fences and better lighting. Such measures irritated the thieves and drug peddlers who ruled the streets. They tore down the fences. Lindsey and some neighbors put the fences up again, then stood guard. One thug attacked Lindsey with a knife, slashed through his windbreaker and cut his stomach. Lindsey whipped out a .38 and shoved it under the knifer's nose. "I told him to get on his knees and beg," says Lindsey. "I could have killed that guy."
The rent strike, which Lindsey by now headed, began working. When the strikers cited 200 building-code violations in one block, the city authorities did nothing, so the strikers got the state to bring the landlord to heel. To get more trash collections, the strikers trucked garbage downtown and left it to rot in the sun. Says Lindsey: "People were taking things into their own hands, and that generated a lot of excitement."
Within a year, Citrus Park underwent some remarkable changes. Houses were painted and repaired, gardens were planted, crime rates fell, garbage was , collected. So Lindsey went downtown in his blue jeans and ponytail and applied for the vacant job of city housing-authority director. The housing commissioners at first "freaked out," he says, then listened to his ideas and astonishingly gave him the job.