But Kelly insists that commercial relationships are essential to QB3’s mission. He argues that taxpayers are supporting research not out of abstract curiosity, but because they hope it will have an impact on diseases that affect them or their loved ones, and will help create jobs. “The only way you can improve health is by drugs, diagnostics, and devices, and all of those things require you to interact with industry,” he says. “I have been getting some pushback from people saying this is not something we should be doing—we should not be trying to stimulate the economy through our research. We’re almost entirely funded by the National Institutes of Health, and that’s goal No. 3 of the NIH.”

Kelly is an unlikely evangelist for strengthening university/industry ties. In fact, he remembers blasting colleagues with scathing criticism for entering industry in his earlier days at UCSF. Recalling his views in those days, he describes himself as having been a “very left wing, standard San Francisco progressive.” “Those of us who go into science reject the concept of wanting to become rich,” he says. “We believe there’s a higher value and the higher value is to become an academic and try to gain knowledge for mankind. That doesn’t involve personally making money.” 

While his own financial ambitions haven’t changed—any outside fees he gets for speaking and consulting he says he turns over to QB3—his attitude about the relationship between academia and industry has. He credits the transformation to an epiphany that came in 1990 when Kelly went on a date with Rae Lyn Burke, who would become his third wife. The event they attended together was a Christmas party for Chiron, a biotech company co-founded by his former UCSF colleague Bill Rutter.

Several years earlier, Burke had joined Chiron as its sixth employee, advancing as the company grew to become its senior director of virology. What struck Kelly, he recalls, was how the party, which was held at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, included people from all walks of life and all ethnic groups. “I had this revelation that by creating Chiron, Bill Rutter had created 3,000 jobs. How many jobs had I created being an ivory tower academic?” he asked himself. “I started realizing this was not about wicked business. In fact, creating jobs for people is a worthy goal. That’s what industry did.”

Descended from a long line of herring fisherman, Kelly was raised in a working class family in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was born a Wallace, but became a Kelly when he was four after his father had died and he was given the surname of his stepfather. His mother scrubbed factory floors for a living. His stepfather worked as a window washer, and later became an auto mechanic.

But with the rise of the labor party after World War II, new government policies provided Kelly with a free education at the University of Edinburgh, where he earned a degree in physics. He pursued graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, a place he says was skilled at “retreading” physicists to become biologists.

In 1969, he went to Harvard University for post-doctoral work under Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg, who Kelly says ran his lab like a “marine boot camp.” Kelly performed important research in DNA replication there, but had a combative relationship with Kornberg that extended beyond science to their views on that era’s tumultuous political and social changes. Though Kelly was a rising star within molecular biology, their rocky relationship contributed to his decision to turn his attention to neuroscience. Kelly took an offer to join the faculty at UCSF and redirect his research efforts in the hopes of understanding the molecular basis of memory.

Today, he laughs about this decision, saying it was far too early to dive into molecular neuroscience because the tools necessary to explore the essential problems didn’t yet exist. At UCSF, though, Kelly performed foundational research on proteins in brain synapses. He rose through the administrative ranks, and by 2000, was executive vice chancellor of research at UCSF. At the time, the university was in the process of opening a second campus in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, an industrial wasteland of abandoned rail lines and warehouses soon to be transformed into a research, clinical, and corporate biomedical complex.