Prognosis
A Harvard Professor Made $400 Million in Moderna’s Biotech IPO
Timothy Springer invested $5 million in the startup’s early days. His windfall is one in a series of savvy investments.
Timothy Springer smiles during an interview in Boston, on Dec. 6.
Photographer: Scott Eisen/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
On the Sunday before Moderna Inc. launched one of the biggest initial public offerings in biotechnology history, one of its earliest investors was giving a lecture about rocks.
Timothy Springer, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is a collector of gongshi, or scholars’ rocks, from China. As Moderna executives prepared for the company’s much-anticipated stock-market debut, the unassuming academic spoke at the Boston Sculptors Gallery about his search for the fantastically shaped stones that have inspired poets and artists for centuries.