A Harvard Professor Made $400 Million in Moderna’s Biotech IPO

On the Sunday before Moderna Inc. launched one of the biggest initial public offerings in biotechnology history, one of its earliest investors was giving a lecture about rocks.

Timothy Springer, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is a collector of gongshi, or scholars’ rocks, from China. As Moderna executives prepared for the company’s much-anticipated stock-market debut, the unassuming academic spoke at the Boston Sculptors Gallery about his search for the fantastically shaped stones that have inspired poets and artists for centuries.

Timothy Springer smiles during an interview in Boston, on Dec. 6.

Photographer: Scott Eisen/Bloomberg

“The way he’s interested in stones, it’s the same way he’s interested in his work,” said ...