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Posted on Wed, Mar. 06, 2002

Slain scientist mourned
MOTIVE STILL MYSTERY IN DEATH OF GENETIC RESEARCHER
By Sean Webby
Mercury News

When Tanya Holzmayer signed a contract four years ago to lead a Silicon Valley biotech company toward its search for new anti-cancer drugs, it surprised no one that the pioneering scientist spent her bonus on a Steinway grand piano.

Holzmayer would often sit at her gleaming black instrument and lose herself in a passionate Russian prelude, her beloved son and dog as an audience. She was an old-fashioned romantic, her friends agreed -- brilliant, driven, equally elegant as a person and a scientist.

In the week after she was gunned down at her own front door, her brother played one of her favorite Rachmaninoff recordings as family and friends gathered at her Mountain View home this week to mourn her, remember her and to wonder why she died.

Holzmayer's killer was a fellow genetic science pioneer. Matthew Huang's motive remains mysterious to investigators. Her contact with Huang was limited to a past job from which she had to fire him. In their final encounter at her doorway, Huang leaped from behind a pizza delivery man to fire the fatal shots, and then took his own life.

Yet Holzmayer and Huang shared similar life stories: Both were foreign-born scientists who came to America seeking intellectual and personal freedom. He was from China. She was from the former Soviet Union. About all they brought with them were their brilliant minds.

The Holzmayers were a family of intellectuals and artists, exiled by Stalin in the 1930s and finally settling 20 years later in Petrozavodsk, a cultured city filled with museums and statues of Peter the Great about 300 miles north of St. Petersburg. Tanya was a precocious girl, entranced by music, literature and art and science. By 17, she was fluent in French and English and could play Rachmaninoff with ease. That year she was accepted to Moscow State University to study biology and music.

Moscow nights

Elena Budrene-Katz, now a research assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, met her in Moscow as a young student. She recalled that they once signed up for night research so they could spend their day attending a Tchaikovsky festival.

``We had lived on three hours of sleep a night,'' said Budrene-Katz. ``But we were so happy. She was always like that. So much energy. She did not have enough time to do everything she wanted to do.''

Holzmayer married a fellow biologist in Moscow in the early 1980s. In 1989, as the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble, the young couple and their baby boy, Alex, left for Chicago.

``When I said goodbye to her, we both thought we would never see each other again,'' said her brother Andrew. They would reunite, however. He now owns an art studio and collectibles business north of Chicago.

In Chicago, Holzmayer worked in the labs of fellow Russian Igor Roninson at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

She was destined to make a name for herself in the burgeoning field of genetic research, Roninson said. Scientists around the world had begun mapping the human genome, looking to identify many molecular targets for new medicines. To harness that information, Holzmayer knew she had to find a way to focus on the most critical targets -- the places where drugs are most likely to work. So Roninson and Holzmayer created a new technological approach called GSX.

It was her hope that GSX technology would improve the productivity of bio-pharmaceutical research by directly identifying particular genes that are involved in diseases such as cancer, heart disease and viral infections. Once these genes could be identified, they could be used as tools to kill disease-causing cells, she said.

Holzmayer and her husband divorced in the early 1990s.

Soon afterward, she moved with her son to the Bay Area to work on the GSX approach for a start-up company called Ingenex. She was equally entranced with the work of Silicon Valley's biotech firms and the sunny, verdant environment. She loved, her friends said, the smell of lemon trees.

In 1994, PPD, an international company, bought Ingenex. Holzmayer was hired as a vice president, heading the biotech firm's genomics research.

Holzmayer was almost ferocious in her interests, those who knew her said.

She would fly around the world like a teenage groupie to see her favorite pianist Mikhail Pletnev play or conduct his repertoire of the great Russian composers.

Tireless concentration

Last year, Holzmayer, 46, quit her job at PPD. She wanted to start her own company and was beginning to gather a small group of scientists and friends to help her.

One of these was Jan D'Alvise, president of NuGen Technologies in San Carlos.

Holzmayer, she said, was trying to create a company that would further streamline the complex process of finding treatments for cancer and HIV.

``She had a way of looking at a problem in a new and creative way,'' D'Alvise said. ``I believe she was onto some exciting ideas, ideas that one day could have become potential cures. I hope that people will carry on her work.''

But perhaps as much as her brilliance as a scientist, D'Alvise was touched by Holzmayer's warmth. D'Alvise had dinner at Holzmayer's a week before she died. After she cooked and served a grand Russian dinner, Holzmayer ushered her friend into the living room.

She announced that she had taught her springer spaniel to play the piano.

``Oh Tanya!'' D'Alvise said, laughing.

Then they sat and listened as the brilliant geneticist, seated at her prized Steinway and holding the paws of the dog in her lap, played ``Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.''


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IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

A fund has been set up to take care of Holzmayer's son. Checks can be sent to:

The Tanya Holzmayer Memorial Fund, c/o Comerica Bank Palo Alto Branch, 250 Lytton Ave., MC 4359, Palo Alto, Calif. 94301