Sally Smith Hughes

Sally Smith Hughes, Ph.D., is a retired Academic Specialist in the History of Science in the Regional Oral History Office at The Bancroft Library. She began work at the Bancroft Library in 1978, and her research interest included the history of recent biological science and its commercialization. 

Her main focus for over a decade has been on the biotechnology industry in California and its interrelationships with basic science at Stanford, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted over 150 in-depth, archival-quality oral histories, with subjects ranging from the AIDS epidemic to medical physics to virology, for the Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies.

Hughes is the author of The Virus: A History of the Concept (Heinemann, 1977) and "Making Dollars Out of DNA: The First Major Patent in Biotechnology and the Commercialization of Molecular Biology, 1974–1980"(PDF file)(link is external). She has also recently published a book on the earliest years of Genentech, titled Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech.