“A common sense solution to America’s health problems?” asks Dr. David Agus, author of the best-selling “A Short Guide to a Long Life” and co-founder of Applied Proteomics, a big-data La Jolla diagnostics company. “How about making elevators coin-operated?”

Agus, head of the University of Southern California’s Westside Cancer Center, an expert in molecular medicine and a CBS News contributor, has become an apostle of prevention.

He once stood up in an auditorium of oncologists and declared that metastatic cancer was better approached with preventive measures — before cancer was diagnosed — since cure rates after-the-fact are only marginally better than they were 50 years ago.

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Greg Lucier has made the 21st century — the biological century — into a wise business proposition.

In a deal completed Monday, Chief Executive Lucier and his team merged Carlsbad’s Life Technologies with Thermo Fisher, based in Waltham, Mass. Thermo paid $13.6 billion for Life, closer to $16 billion if you count assumed debt, in a deal that highly valued the company’s Ion Torrent genetic sequencing platform as well as Life’s bread-and-butter consumable lab products. The terms also provided Lucier with a $38 million personal exit.

How did he do it — drive up the business of Life from $778 million a year in revenue in 2003 to $3.8 billion in 2012 — and what does he plan to do next?

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“Innovation Night” at the La Jolla Playhouse was both a sad and a raucous affair this year.

Sad, because it was dedicated to Duane Roth, the late director of Connect, an organization that brings inventors and investors together. Roth, who died after a bicycle accident in July, had coined the term Innovation Night as a way to link San Diego’s innovative wireless, biotech and high-tech industries to the innovative theater productions the Playhouse is known for.

But raucous, too, because the gala opening play was “Side Show,” which is about two female circus performers, conjoined twins, not unlike innovative technologies and the future of San Diego, someone laughed at intermission.


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Fernando Aguerre, 55, the co-founder with his brother Santiago of the iconic surf brand Reef, has reached the statesman stage of life.

The Surf Industry Manufacturers Association named him Waterman of the Year, one of only two times in 24 years that a business guy, as opposed to surf legends Greg Noll, Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, has been picked.

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This year's Kyoto laureates, from left: Robert Dennard, for advanced technology; Masatoshi Nei, for basic sciences; and Cecil Taylor, for arts and philosophy. — Steve Chapple

KYOTO, Japan — Kyocera is a company you don’t see.



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Drones are flying high.

3D Robotics, started by kid genius Mexican engineer Jordi Muñoz, now 27, and Wired magazine visionary Chris Anderson, 52, just received $30 million in additional investor funding.

The company is expanding to 100 employees spread among current engineering headquarters on Convoy Court in San Diego, manufacturing facilities in Tijuana, and sales and marketing in Berkeley, with capacity expected to double.


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Test preparation for college entrance exams, especially for the crucial Scholastic Aptitude Test, has become a $2 billion to $4 billion industry, along with the market for downloads and book supplements.

There has been much debate about whether test prep can increase scores and by how much — a cost-ineffective 30 points or a healthy 100, enough to raise an admissions officer’s eyebrows and cause hand-clapping among parents who pay for all this.

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Emily Sugihara, 30, has made the lowly shopping bag fashionable.

With her mother, Joan, she is the creator of the Baggu, the colorful, “carry in style” reusable bag sold in hip stores from Urban Outfitters to Collette in Paris, as well as Nordstrom and J.Crew. Hundreds of thousands more, at a basic price of $9, are sold through the bright and spare Baggu website, which looks like a Google home page for the fashion-conscious.

“My mom and I just don’t like to buy ugly stuff. We care about function and fashion, and we feel we are representative of a demographic that appreciates this.”

Back in 2007 when modestly self-funded Baggu launched, the choices at checkout were plastic or paper, with the occasional dorky net bag from France. The Sugiharas felt a simple bag could double as a fashion accessory, an over-the-shoulder splash of pure color — saffron, cobalt — as a shopper walked home. Forget drab brown paper or eco-horrid plastic.


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