Word: swansons
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DIED. GERRY THOMAS, 83, inventor of the TV dinner; in Phoenix, Ariz. He came up with the idea as a marketer for poultry company C.A. Swanson & Sons, after seeing that Pan American Airways was developing a flat aluminum tray for hot in-flight meals. Since Swanson had a post-Thanksgiving bird surplus, he devised a multi-compartment tray for the turkey and accompanying side dishes. Introduced in 1954 with a package resembling a TV set, the dinners took off, selling 10 million that year and earning Thomas a raise, a spot on Hollywood's Walk of Fame and hate letters...
...Gloria Swanson, for example, pays homage to "Mr. Edison . . . and all the people who had any thing to do with an invention. It made it possible to put us all in tin cans, like sardines. We could have been bad actors, it didn't matter. It was the fact of volume . . . you were just shipped everywhere." Louise Brooks, the '20s star who first retired from films in 1931 at the age of 25, recalls everything and glamourizes nothing: "They keep talking now about deterioration and how the films are lost. They always forget that the big way they were lost...
...million for rights to the next four seasons of N.B.A. games, and they are balking at the hefty fees being demanded for major league baseball and N.F.L. games. "We aren't conceding anything to the competition, but we are getting out of the red ink," says Dennis Swanson, the new president of ABC Sports. One casualty could be Monday Night Football, a once lucrative ABC mainstay, which lost $25 million this past season. (Two of the show's high-priced analysts, Joe Namath and O.J. Simpson, have already been dropped from the broadcast, though Simpson may remain with...
...synthetic insulin, but licensed it to an established pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, which put the drug on the market. Protropin, which is expected to generate annual sales of $40 million, is the first human drug that a new biotech company has tried to sell on its own. Says Robert Swanson, Genentech's cofounder: "This is the beginning of the coming of age of the biotechnology industry...
...Cetus' Fildes: "I can't predict the future, but I can tell you that Cetus is definitely not interested in being acquired by a large drug company. We think we have the products, the financing and the experienced people to build a very successful business on our own." Echoes Swanson of Genentech: "I believe we are well on our way to building a major, profitable pharmaceutical company." But Genentech, Cetus and the other pioneers of the brave new world of biotech still have a long way to go. --By Charles P. Alexander. Reported by Cristina Garcia/San Francisco