Genentech's campus on the eastern waterfront of South San Francisco is the spiritual home of the modern biotech industry. The company was founded here in 1976 — the first firm to use recombinant DNA technology to produce human proteins — and its success attracted hundreds of other life-science companies to the area. The biotech corridor along East Grand Avenue is now one of the most valuable concentrations of pharmaceutical research in the world.
The campus is not open to the general public, but it is visible from the road, and the sheer scale of it — dozens of research buildings, a large manufacturing facility, and a waterfront site on the Bay — gives some sense of what South San Francisco has become since those early days in a small rented warehouse. A walk or cycle along the Bay Trail near the campus offers views back toward San Francisco and along the Bay.