San Francisco Bay Area a Dream place to live! (Vol19 ) Down Memory Lane!

Golden Gate Bridge San Francisco

    My first experience in Pharma started with Baxter in the year 2004.It was at their Beltsville Maryland Plant that manufactured Meningitis vaccines.  

    We were staying in Virginia at that time.  As the Beltsville plant had been acquired by Baxter, it had older systems and technology difficult to maintain. That is where we engineers come in to keep the plant running with obsolescence, a challenging environment.  The plant had been struggling to meet the increasing demand for these vaccines at Europe. 

   It looked like our family was well set in Virginia, when the unexpected happened. Due to recurring maintenance issues Baxter Management finally decided to shift the entire vaccine manufacturing to Vienna Austria.  It also made business sense because the bulk vaccines produced at this plant was used for final vial filling in the state-of--art Vienna facility. Manufacturing the entire vaccine at Vienna was economical option rather than upgrading this aging plant. Having worked for already six years in this plant and happy with the Baxter culture at site decided to accept the position offered at Baxter Hayward Plant in the San Francisco Bay Area.

     That is how we moved to Bay Area a dream place to live if you can afford. We were there for six years in Fremont a great place to live first in a hi-tech apartment and then in a single- family home. It was one of the best periods of my professional career thanks to my wonderful colleagues an amazing cross functional team of experts. The plant was not that big but a right size and that was a boon because we all know each other and worked like one big family with lots of fun.

Baxter Hayward Team with  Mei,Caroline,Pranav,Lisa,Joe,Loay

Baxter Entrance with Ishak Plant Manager Loay,Sucheta,Joe,Mark 

with MSAT unsung heroes Patrick and Acquilla!

San Francisco History: Europeans did not encounter the spectacular San Francisco Bay until 1769, although several explorers had sailed by it in earlier centuries. In 1776, the Spanish built a military post on the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula and founded the mission of San Francisco de Asis. In 1835, the British Captain William Richardson established a private settlement on the shore of Yerba Buena Cove, several miles to the east of the Mexican mission.

View of Yerba Buena Cove San Francisco in 1846

 A little more than a decade later, a dispute between the U.S. and Mexico over western Texas led to war. In 1846, US Captain John Montgomery, led a party of marines and sailors ashore and claimed the settlement for the United States, raising the American flag in the central plaza. The following year, the Americans renamed the village San Francisco. When the Mexicans formally ceded California to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, San Francisco was still a small town with perhaps 900 occupants. That same year, however, gold was discovered at the nearby Sutter’s Fort and San Francisco became the gateway for a massive gold rush after that.

San Francisco in 1848

Amazing Facts on California:  California is an immigrant friendly state. California's GDP in 2021 was $3.35T, representing 14.6% of the total U.S. economy.

     California's economy is so big that if it were a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world, more productive than India and the United Kingdom.  Silicon Valley remains the tech capital of the world.

     In the U.S., California is the largest producer of food despite having less than 4% of the farms in the country. Over a third of the country's vegetables and two-thirds of the country's fruits and nuts are grown in California. It produces almost all of the country's almonds, apricots, dates, figs, kiwi fruit, nectarines, olives, pistachios, prunes, and walnuts due to the climate.  80% of almonds produced in the world is from California.

    The Mediterranean climate of San Francisco makes the Bay Area pleasant all year around. It is characterized by warm to hot summers and winters that are short, mild, and wet. No doubt due to this salubrious climate it is a farmer's delight as they can produce high value items that can fetch good return.

    The best places in San Francisco are the Golden Gate Bridge and Lombard Street and one can visit any number of times these places and every visit will look like your first visit!

Golden Gate Bridge: Before the bridge was built, the only practical short route between San Francisco and what is now Marin County was by boat across a section of San Francisco Bay. 

 The Golden Bridge spans the three-mile-long Golden Gate Strait connecting the Marin Headlands to the city of San Francisco. Completed in 1937 after four years of dangerous, complicated work, the bridge stands as a testament to human ingenuity and intelligence. At the time of completion, the Golden Gate Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Engineers and architects believed it impossible to build a bridge over such a long channel, with its strong tides, deep water (372 feet at its deepest) and heavy outbursts of wind and fog. It is an architectural wonder no doubt!

Aerial view of Golden Gate Bridge

How Lombard Street became crooked? In 1922, the homeowners on the 1000 block of Lombard Street decided that their street was too steep for comfort and created the plan to create a series of eight sharp turns to make it more manageable. The result: eight tight switchback turns in 600 feet of road. Driving down is a cool experience (speed 5 mile/hour). The paving bricks are a little slippery, and the turns are tight. Winding down a steep hill in a field of blooming hydrangeas...such fun! And what a great view of the Bay Bridge and the Bay, if you can take your eyes off the road!

Lombard Street

Baxter Hayward: In the Baxter Hayward Plant we had two product lines one for Biologics and another for Medical Devices. 

   Baxter wanted to focus on more profitable Biologics division and formed a separate company Baxalta. Within 6 months of forming Baxalta the company sold Baxalta to another Pharma company Shire an aggressive buyer. Corporate takeover and closure are common in US unlike India, and nothing is permanent. Unfortunately, it is the shareholders that determine the fate of the companies not the employees like us. 

   Since I was working in Baxalta, I became the employee of Shire automatically without any choice. It was not easy for Shire to acquire this Hayward site as this was one site where both Baxter and Shire shared the same building and facilities and even software. This was not acceptable from FDA regulatory perspective. 

  Shire decided to sell the Hayward site eventually which was acquired by Lonza. Seeing all these uncertainties the employees started leaving Baxalta Hayward for a more stable environment. My Baxter friends who are still there are now part of Lonza hopefully enjoying their bonanza😀

  Pharma engineers and scientists are paid same whether they work in Mid-West, East or in Bay Area. Although our life was good in Bay Area financially, we were in deep trouble. 60% of my take home pay went for rent. Any home or even apartment in the Bay area costs no less than a million dollar and imagine the monthly repayment. This Silicon Valley is only for rich IT folks in my opinion. 

  The logical solution was to go back to East Coast in order to lead a sustainable life. Shire had purchased the Biologics Plasma filling plant from Baxter at Chicago Round Lakes. I accepted the offer there and we moved to Mid-West (Chicago) about 5 years back which is still our home for now.

Entire Baxter team at Loay sendoff party

Baxter colleagues: What a diverse team we had in Baxter …Ishak Mohammed my earlier boss (a good Team builder) who became later Plant Manager…Loay Morsy my boss(It was Joy always!😁)from Egypt,Caithlyn and Coroline Nguyen from Vietnam, Riddhi(Entertainer😊), Pranav (my last boss),Sucheta(Most popular one at site😃),Pushpa, Ganesh (MVP pouched by more than one department😂), Sminder, Neha and Rajesh(my counterpart in validation) all from India, Joe(Engineer turned model😎!),Mei Tan (MSAT genius😇) and Huan from China, Eugene (Expert from Russia whose only problem was communication), Katherina from Lithuania, Laia from  Spain,(for perfection😀)and all my other American colleagues .  This team have spread out in the small pharma world to different companies now. 

My farewell party at Indian Restaurant Hayward

 I miss the wonderful colleagues at Baxter and looking back always recall those wonderful time at Baxter Hayward and the beautiful Bay Area!

TO BE CONCLUDED