Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
William A. “Bill” Linton
Founder and longtime leader of Promega Corporation; Fitchburg headquarters and principal residence
$4 million
William A. “Bill” Linton is the biotech founder who put Fitchburg on the map with a private company that sells the picks and shovels of genetic research. He did not inherit the city. He built the part of it that has a skyline along Woods Hollow Road. He studied biochemistry and biology at Berkeley, then pharmaceutical chemistry in Madison, shaped by a father who took car engines apart on the floor and grandparents who had been missionaries in the Far East. In 1978 he started a garage company—then Biotec, later Promega—that sold restriction enzymes to scientists splicing DNA. The firm never went public. Fitchburg became home: hundreds of jobs at 2800 Woods Hollow Road, a subsidized childcare center he put on his land in 1991 so Promega parents would stop worrying, and a $1 million library pledge with his wife, Mary, before the referendum even passed. His separately owned 400-acre Fitchburg Center still holds the Promega campus and City Hall. He fought Roche for thirteen years over a DNA-replication patent and did not settle until the Swiss giant came to him. The DNA IQ kit helped identify victims of September 11. He still runs Promega and the neighboring Usona Institute and talks about a hundred-year plan for a private company. A former Fitchburg mayor said he put the city on the map. The downtown he once sketched on those 400 acres never quite arrived. The campus did.