After a year in which she blazed a path in patents and policies at the firm (she was the first pregnant attorney at Townsend and Townsend) she was recruited by Chiron Corporation to set up a patent division. With responsibility for the entire Vaccines Division intellectual portfolio, McClung formulated the company’s patent strategy worldwide, oversaw litigation, and technology licensing. During this period she also taught legal writing at Golden Gate University School of Law. In comparison to the long-established protocols she followed at DuPont, McClung notes that in creating a division “everything was a decision” – including setting up a patent numbering system, something she took for granted at DuPont. “It takes a certain kind of temperament to set up a department,” McClung says. “It’s like furnishing a house – you can make it your own.” Some of the patent development that took place while she was there involved treatments for AIDS, herpes, and whooping cough. In 1998 McClung was recruited to Cygnus. “I wanted to see what it would be like to run an office,” she recalls. Over the past four years she has built a department with responsibility for corporate transactions, securities filings, board governance and contract management. This year, Cygnus began the sale in the U.S. of its Glucowatch ® Biographer, a wristwatch worn by diabetics which reads the patient’s glucose level without pricking the skin through electromagnetic currents. At Penn in the early 1980s McClung took advantage of coursework in science, medicine and law available throughout campus. “There are few universities that have the variety of schools that Penn has,” McClung observes. In her Ph.D. program in Physical Anthropology she took anatomy classes in the Medical School and biostatistics in the Biology Department. As a law student, she took a course on the ethics of the healthcare system. She recalls sitting in a class taught by Emeritus Professor Richard Lonsdorf discussing the ethical conundrum in the “Baby M” child surrogacy lawsuit that was in trial in New Jersey. At Commencement she was awarded the Henry C. Loughlin Prize for a paper she authored on legal ethics. At age 47, married with two children, McClung allows her mind to wander to the next opportunity she might
seize. “I miss teaching,” she says. “I need to find a way to get back to that.” But which subject she’d teach
would be anyone’s guess. Spin a wheel and chances are wherever it lands McClung has mastered expertise
to share with other inquiring minds. |
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