Exposure to a smorgasbord of cultural, linguistic and political influences during Gerard Lipowski’s youth forged his outlook on life and so shaped his career. Born and raised in Poland, as a teenager he experienced the nation’s rapid journey from Soviet-controlled communism to uncontrolled “Wild West capitalism” and his school Russian teacher’s transformation into a German teacher. Drawn by the desire to reconnect with family roots and the desire for a top-tier science education, Lipowski then headed to the École Polytechnique in Paris.
“I’d been in France before, but only briefly. Living there is different. When I started actually living in France, I felt: mamma mia, this is really a socialist country. All of this enriched me — seeing these various systems, ways of thinking, cultures. In every system there were good points and less good points. There was never a perfect story, a perfect system. Later I lived in the US and Germany. Japan made me think again: Japan is also a very socialist country, by various standards I’ve seen in my life.”
Lipowski says he was fortunate to be surrounded by great people on his life sciences PhD, a recurring pattern for him during his career, but felt the course was more geared towards academia than industry, which he addressed by taking additional courses on business management and innovation.
Steep learning curve
His first job upon graduation at a startup delivered a business crash course that more than filled in any gaps. “It was a small company — about 15 people. We had all-company meetings where everyone sat in the same room: CEO, CFO, heads of chemistry, research, everything. The startup was in microarray technology, which was bleeding edge innovation — so new that it could not yet be learned on any academic course. Having everyone in the same room talking about business, orders, money, science, IP was a completely new world for me, and I loved it. At the beginning, I didn’t even understand what they were talking about. Little by little I connected the dots.”
While there, a European scientist working at AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) in Osaka came to introduce the very advanced microarray tech they were developing, a meeting that would later lead Lipowski to Japan.
But Lipowski’s next stop was the Institut Curie in Paris, which he calls a “temple of science and technology,” its halls still dotted with Marie Curie’s artefacts, including her teaching table and lab notebook, still radioactive a century on. However, it was the daily walk past the cancer hospital in the same building that reshaped his sense of what mattered. “Every day I saw people with what looked like a death sentence on their faces.” It was a situation translating French for a foreign family’s forty-something patriarch being treated for stomach cancer that drove the point home. “I realised that this is what my work is about: bringing innovation to the hands of doctors so they can save lives.”
Non-linear journeys
He had begun to look beyond France, also exploring Switzerland’s biotech ecosystem, but still considered Japan a step too far into the unknown. Encountering the AIST scientist again, he accepted the suggestion to visit first as tourist, arriving in 2005. Lipowski was not the first foreigner to get that all-important first impression from a scrupulously honest taxi driver. After the driver appeared to being driving around and around, he suspected the worst. “My instinct was, he’s trying to charge us more; that’s what I’d expect in Europe. But no, he apologised a million times for getting lost, and then tried to refuse payment.”
His subsequent career path was also non-linear. Lipowski moved to Osaka with AIST in 2006, but was off to Munich within months on a Marie Curie Excellence grant. He returned to France to co-found a health-tech startup sourcing technology from Japan and Korea, only for the 2008 financial crisis to bankrupt a key Korean partner and vanish investors. He rejoined AIST in 2009 as an industrial project leader in Tokyo, where he was working when the 2011 earthquake struck. Lipowski took a scheduled trip to a UK conference days later, then returned to his lab on schedule to the delight of his Japanese colleagues, who had thought he might flee as many foreigners did at the time. “They actually hugged me when I walked in. That’s when I felt I was really part of the team — accepted as uchi.”
Lipowski went on to found a venture with Japanese partners, which he exited, led the Japan operations of an international healthcare firm, and acted as an advisor for a major domestic pharma corporation.
These days, he runs his own consulting practice, working internationally with healthcare and life sciences companies on business development and partnership, bringing together innovators, investors and strategic partners, mainly between Japan, Europe and North America, but ultimately wherever promising innovation and opportunity arise. Yet he says what underpins it all hasn’t changed since those Institut Curie hospital lobby mornings: “If you have health, you may find energy, ideas, love, money. If you don’t have health, you can lose everything.”
Text: Gavin Blair for SCCIJ
