Franklin Pass was born in Deluth, Minnesota. His father, a lawyer, died when Pass was twelve years old, after which his family moved to Minneapolis. He attended the University of Minnesota and graduated from medical school in 1961. While studying, Pass gravitated toward dermatology. After moving to Los Angeles, California, to work at a county hospital, Pass did a dermatology residency at Oregon Health and Science University. While in Oregon, Pass was drafted into the military. He did his basic training in Baltimore, Maryland, before being reassigned to Denver, Colorado and then to Japan. While in the military, Pass decided he wanted to pursue academic medicine. After leaving the military, he began working as a post-doc with Donald Marcus in his immunochemistry lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He initially studied eczema but switched to cancer research after facing difficulty securing grant funding. Pass eventually was awarded a National Institutes of Health grant for wart research, which prompted him to return to Minnesota, moving back to Minneapolis in the summer of 1973. While in Minneapolis, Pass began working with Anthony Faras and Gerard Orth, the latter of which posited that the viruses that caused warts could also be oncogenic viruses. After examining a patient with both warts and cancer, and finding her papilloma virus in her cancer, the group presented their findings at a conference. The group also studied warts and cancer in non-human subjects, such as calves.

In October 1978, Pass, along with Abraham White, founded Molecular Genetics, with a plan to create a bovine wart virus vaccine. It took over a year for the company to raise enough money to sustain itself, after which they built a small laboratory and hired personnel. Continuing financial issues led the company to expand beyond bovine vaccines into the corn genetics business, which they did after collaborating with molecular biologists at the University of Minnesota. Corn genetics proved to be a viable field for the company, and they helped develop corn feeding programs in corn-milling industries, as well as opened a bioseed company in the Netherlands called Mogen. Pass helped build Molecular Genetics to thirty-four PhD scientists and ninety lab workers before he was let go from the company in in November 1986. Molecular Genetics would later become MGI Pharma Inc. and was purchased by Esai for 3.6 billion dollars. Pass concludes his interview by talking about his current work and connections to California, his recommendations for other interviewees, and well as driving the interviewer around the local neighborhood in Minneapolis.