Article from the year 2009:
Stephen Friend had it all at Merck. The lucrative salary, the national media fame, the respect of peers, the power to snap his fingers and command a corporate army of some of the brightest minds in biomedicine. This year, he gave it all up for a startup dream.

Friend, 54, is best known in Seattle as the founder of Rosetta Inpharmatics, the cutting-edge genome analysis company that was acquired by Merck in 2001 for more than $600 million.
For the past eight years, he worked on the East Coast as a senior vice president for Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, and spent much of his time running the company’s worldwide cancer research. Now he’s back in Seattle, dreaming big again as founder and CEO of a global nonprofit collaborative called Sage Bionetworks.
http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/...ngle_page=true

This is the Sage website: http://sagebase.org/

Commons congress
http://sagecongress.org/WP/

The first thread started by Dr. Friend on this Forum is here:
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/thread184054.html