25 ms·

Google Life Sciences Exodus

221 points by plinkplonk 11y ago

rdtsc 11y ago
> Friends call him charming and farsighted — a “disruptor,” in the words of former Paramount Pictures head Sherry Lansing, who will “always challenge the way things are done.” Well disrupting markets is cool, disrupting people not always. From experience, usually managers who like to disrupt have some insecurity about them (they know they lack technical knowledge or other personal things) or they are under high pressure, which translates to going around disrupting things because it feels to them and to those above them that work is being done -- "look at all this work, we've re-organized practices 2x this year, switched to agile and so on isn't that great!" kind of stuff.
- iofj 11y ago
  I have never worked at a place were that wasn't the case for higher management. In some places that was 90% of what management did (ie. 100% of what was visible to reports plus more that wasn't even directly visible), in some places it was 30% or so (ie. 50% of what was visible to reports). But I've never been at a place where turning the wheel (a -> b -> c -> a) wasn't a big part of what management did.
ilamont 11y ago
Former employees, however, characterized Conrad in less complimentary tones. They said he exaggerates what Verily can deliver, launches big projects on a whim, and rashly diverts resources from prior commitments to the next hot idea that might bring in revenue. This reminded me of the Bloomberg article about Boston Dynamics: (1) But behind the scenes a more pedestrian drama was playing out. Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale Is it safe to say that despite Google's founders' expansive visions of the future, the company is not really interested in expensive "moonshots" that might take many years to realize? It sounds like the robotics and medical innovation labs are really more focused on inventions that will bring in cash in the next few years. 1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/google-is-said-to-put-boston-dynamics-robotics-unit-up-for-sale http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/google-is-...
- Niksko 11y ago
  That's a shame. I'd like to believe that large companies like Google could throw a bit of cash towards open-ended problems. Realistically it's large companies, governments (please no) and research institutions that can afford to think on large timescales. Governments don't and probably shouldn't, research institutions are fine, but large corporations with nice payscales also feel to me like they should be taking part.
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    Government augmenting research institutions has been the only consistent source of funding for research that doesn't pay out in a 2-5 year timespan. Theere's plenty of waste in the government, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the typical types of government waste or incompetence in for example the NSF. Unless you believe basic science is wasteful I guess.
    - mturmon 11y ago
      Here's a neat example of government support for telescopes from a few years ago: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2016/02/the-galilean-moons.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2016/02/the-galilean-moons.html "Galileo Galilei most humbly prostrates himself before Your Highness ... to write of having decided to present to Your Highness a telescope that will be a great help in maritime and land enterprises. ... This telescope has the advantage of discovering the ships of the enemy two hours before they can be seen with the natural vision and to distinguish the number and quality of the ships and to judge their strength ..."
  - dorfsmay 11y ago
    Isn't a lot of medical research funded by governments? Wasn't Pasteur essentially working for the government when he made his discoveries?
    - dekhn 11y ago
      In the US, the NIH invests $30B/yr (and other agencies also fund medical research). Note, they're more expansive: much of the research has been into basic biology with no immediate applications (often called pure research, although we were trained to always say the research would eventually leading to curing cancer). England and Japan also do this. Much of the most impactful research has taken decades to play out and the original research didn't necessarily have medical goals, but turned out to be necessary to making progress. Some companies have high enough profit margins to dedicate large budgets to research with no immediate applications. Genentech is the first one that comes to mind, but there are others. It takes a great deal of courage to fund this sort of research when you are a CSO or CEO because of constant calls for immediate profits. I've seen this play out for so long- in biology, in physics, and IT- that I've become inured to the idea that most good ideas take decades to play out until the profits arrive. I am not entirely certain whether it's correct to say Pasteur was working for the government. When a scientist reaches his level of stature, she pays her own ticket.
searine 11y ago
Biology is hard in a way that directly conflicts with silicon valley managerial thinking. There is a reason pharma and biotech companies are slow lumbering giants. It's so they can absorb the impact of R&D failures.
- toufka 11y ago
  The trouble is that there is some (new) biological science that takes the old massive and powerful tool and applies them to low-hanging fruit that were (until recently), not worth the effort. I've been waiting for some of these moonshot-ish plans to take on these problems, rather than try and compete with the Goliath drug companies. Sadly, since they keep hiring from drug-company stock, they keep getting the same result.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    examples?
    - toufka 11y ago
      New fragrances & colors (L'Oreal), new materials (Bolt Threads), new sensors, new foods (Impossible Foods), and further, all the infrastructure required to nurture these kinds of companies. A Google-X-Style project designed to build the boring digital infrastructure that links all of the above companies would be so enabling, if less sexy.
- refurb 11y ago
  I was going to mention this. Andy Grove wrote a number of papers where he said "if biotech just does what the tech sector does, we'd have hundreds of new drugs". The fact is, it doesn't work that way in biology. When developing new biotech, you'd be lucky if you understood 5% of what a new drug does in the body (sometimes it's 0%!). Serendipity plays a huge part in new drug discovery, although most companies don't like to admit it. Also, I'm not surprised that Google has matured to the point where "moonshots" don't work so well. You see it in biopharma as well. Huge companies, with billions of dollars of R&D spend fail to produce new innovation on a regular basis. It's the small biotech companies that seem to come up with the innovations, often on a much smaller budget. The reasons for that are multiple, but it does come down to a big company worrying about how they will grow their $100 billion company by 10% (finding $10B in business isn't easy) and the fact that with large companies comes structure, process and other things that stifle innovation.
onetimePete 11y ago
Turns out people are hard. You can be a brilliant mind, but that doesn't equate to being a good social engineer. No real, tested science on getting all those complex components together and work productively.
tryitnow 11y ago
After reading this article, it's no wonder. Conrad hasn't been a real technical person in decades. He's a hard-charging business type who learned from a billionaire real estate guy. Nothing wrong with that personality type it's just totally not a fit with Google or frankly with managing any sort of technical people.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
Hmm, first quote is from Rob Enderle, who has in my past experience either being a quote-for-hire who will say whatever the journalist wants them to say, or just totally wrong of his own volition. Either way, as annoying as that "Didn't read past..." thing is, seeing his name was enough for me to close the tab.
- mturmon 11y ago
  I was dismayed by that too, but there seems to be a lot of first-hand sources as well. It's a long piece and a very short quote from Enderle.
RickS 11y ago
> he exaggerates what Verily can deliver, launches big projects on a whim, and rashly diverts resources from prior commitments to the next hot idea that might bring in revenue. This has led to what they describe as difficult meetings with business partners, and resignations by demoralized engineers and scientists in the face of seemingly impossible demands. Someone has already made the comparison to boston dynamics, but doesn't this also sound just like the recent problems within dropcam/nest? Does anybody have a counterexample of somebody with this personality leading a team to greatness? It feels like a personality type like this is mentioned more often than not when my technical friends leave companies. Somebody has to frame the memo that guys like this (they're always guys) will kill your org.
- endtime 11y ago
  > they're always guys Marissa Mayer might qualify.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Gini Rometty, Ellen Pao, Meg Whitman, and Carly Fiorina don't exactly have stellar reputations either. I don't think it's a guy thing - I think it's a corporate culture thing. You get failure and disaster whenever you have overpaid and undertalented management. Gender isn't particularly relevant. You especially get failure and disaster when upper management runs a corporation as its own personal cash cow and makes decisions for reasons of self-promotion, self-image, or plain greed, instead of for sound growth-oriented reasons - never mind employee welfare.
vadiml 11y ago
This article cites Rob Enderle. Remembering his performance during SCO/IBM saga I would be very cautious to make conclusions based on his analysis.
iainmerrick 11y ago
What I still don't get is why Google thinks they're good at moonshots, or why they're a good idea in the first place. Google is great at tons of stuff, but all this rhetoric about moonshots seems really empty and baseless.
- trhway 11y ago
  >why Google thinks they're good at moonshots, or why they're a good idea in the first place. this is the only way to deal with a perpetuum mobile of a money printer they've got in house and the resulting 70B+ cash pile problem, and to avoid it growing into 200B problem that Apple is battling (when did you hear anything new from Apple? - yep, this is how left unchecked small issue grows info a big problem). So, either moonshots (probably a lot of them and god forbid one turns into a money printer too) or pay the dividend like IBM.
  - iainmerrick 11y ago
    Or why not cut your margins right down, helping your customers and hurting your competitors, like Amazon?
1_2__3 11y ago
Larry's standard M.O. Hire and empower megalomaniacs because he thinks everything runs too slow and the right way to speed it up is to act like a startup, with one huge personality driving everything. He tried it with Andy/Android, Vic/G+, and Conrad/Verily, among lots of other places. It doesn't work very well, but it looks like it has great 'velocity' so he's happy.
- kmonsen 11y ago
  Having worked for Andy and Conrad I don't think that comparison is true at all.
Balgair 11y ago
Good Lord, there is so much to unpack in this article. Lets start here: In short, he wants “to defeat Mother Nature,” Conrad told STAT in a brief interview last fall when the Verily name was unveiled. I mean, welcome to every doctor and bio researcher ever. Bio is hard, very hard. Think of it this way, your code is actually alive and trying to kill you back. Doyah' think that might increase the complexity and timelines for debugging a bit, maybe? * And its researchers have published just one scholarly article — about a spoon for people with hand tremors.* I actually saw some of this too. It's a neat idea, The Bodine lab at CU Denver does some cool stuff with this too, using rubber-bands and not electronics that run out of batteries. It's cool stuff, really, but its a 'if all you have is a hammer' myopic outlook for the problem. I concede that the leapfrogging would be great from there. A new car has up to 400 different sensors. You know the oil pressure. You know how much air’s in your tires. But we don’t do that for people,” Conrad says on a promotional video posted on Verily’s website. “Instead of episodic, reactive health care, we should provide preventative and proactive health care,” personalized to the individual. Let's ignore the privacy issues that places like 23andme are dealing with when it comes to this level of detail. The cost alone and the time needed to validate these things are non trivial. If you have, I dunno, black skin or freckles, how much more complex did you just make the problem for an optical sensor? Yes, I can hear you already, you start putting in a case struct in your code, blammo, done. Ok, now for every single sense you add, you have to do this all over. Then you have to train this on the staggering variety of healthy human geometry. The time and more importantly, the power, needed to do this increases factorially (I think) with each new sensor paradigm. Oh, and then you sweat a little bit or go outside. In short, this is really hard. Verily says it has two wristbands in the works: one to read diagnostic nanoparticles that would detect cancer or other ailments at very early stages, another to continuously monitor skin temperature, pulse, and other heart activity. Ok, this is a pop-press article and I will give a pass to the band that is essentially a fit-bit. Journalists are low-paid compared to their hours and utility to society and, as such, can make very big differences seem mundane. However, the cancer screening band sounds too good to be true. As such, it likely is. I admit, I have no idea what this thing is or how well it works, but there is a significant test it needs to pass: is it better than a dog? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection) Ok, look, I make it seem like these guys are fools. They are not, they are all very smart and very hard working people that want to see the world as a better place. However, the SV bubble that includes YC and their ventures into biotech, is just foolish here. \ Bio is Hard, full stop. Bio wastes colossal amounts of cash in failed ventures, more so than in tech, though I have no data to back this up. Bio is not something that you 'hack', it hacks you (see any disease or disability). I get it, VCs see the profit margins on Viagra and their mouths get wet. Here is what you need to know though, in biotech the road to success is very very difficult, but once you get 'there' you essentially have a monopoly due to that barrier to entry. But don't confuse that monopoly with the the reality that many grad students and VCs imploded in failed ventures too. Mad respect to those folks working under this guy, but SV needs to understand that debugging yourself is neigh impossible.
amelius 11y ago
Offtopic: given that the life sciences are the promised new hi-tech boom, I'm wondering why there are so few posts about it on HN (?)
- dekhn 11y ago
  Life science was the promised boom 25 years ago when I started undergrad as a mol bio major. Very little progress. I check back in every decade or so and things proceed slowly.
amelius 11y ago
Medicine and an advertising agency, I'm not sure if they are such a great combination anyway.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  A distressingly large function of many pharmaceutical companies is "drugs marketing". There may be more synergy than you think.

221 points by plinkplonk 11y ago

rdtsc 11y ago

> Friends call him charming and farsighted — a “disruptor,” in the words of former Paramount Pictures head Sherry Lansing, who will “always challenge the way things are done.” Well disrupting markets is cool, disrupting people not always. From experience, usually managers who like to disrupt have some insecurity about them (they know they lack technical knowledge or other personal things) or they are under high pressure, which translates to going around disrupting things because it feels to them and to those above them that work is being done -- "look at all this work, we've re-organized practices 2x this year, switched to agile and so on isn't that great!" kind of stuff.

iofj 11y ago
I have never worked at a place were that wasn't the case for higher management. In some places that was 90% of what management did (ie. 100% of what was visible to reports plus more that wasn't even directly visible), in some places it was 30% or so (ie. 50% of what was visible to reports). But I've never been at a place where turning the wheel (a -> b -> c -> a) wasn't a big part of what management did.

ilamont 11y ago

Former employees, however, characterized Conrad in less complimentary tones. They said he exaggerates what Verily can deliver, launches big projects on a whim, and rashly diverts resources from prior commitments to the next hot idea that might bring in revenue. This reminded me of the Bloomberg article about Boston Dynamics: (1) But behind the scenes a more pedestrian drama was playing out. Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale Is it safe to say that despite Google's founders' expansive visions of the future, the company is not really interested in expensive "moonshots" that might take many years to realize? It sounds like the robotics and medical innovation labs are really more focused on inventions that will bring in cash in the next few years. 1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/google-is-said-to-put-boston-dynamics-robotics-unit-up-for-sale http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/google-is-...

Niksko 11y ago
That's a shame. I'd like to believe that large companies like Google could throw a bit of cash towards open-ended problems. Realistically it's large companies, governments (please no) and research institutions that can afford to think on large timescales. Governments don't and probably shouldn't, research institutions are fine, but large corporations with nice payscales also feel to me like they should be taking part.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  Government augmenting research institutions has been the only consistent source of funding for research that doesn't pay out in a 2-5 year timespan. Theere's plenty of waste in the government, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the typical types of government waste or incompetence in for example the NSF. Unless you believe basic science is wasteful I guess.
  - mturmon 11y ago
    Here's a neat example of government support for telescopes from a few years ago: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2016/02/the-galilean-moons.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2016/02/the-galilean-moons.html "Galileo Galilei most humbly prostrates himself before Your Highness ... to write of having decided to present to Your Highness a telescope that will be a great help in maritime and land enterprises. ... This telescope has the advantage of discovering the ships of the enemy two hours before they can be seen with the natural vision and to distinguish the number and quality of the ships and to judge their strength ..."
- dorfsmay 11y ago
  Isn't a lot of medical research funded by governments? Wasn't Pasteur essentially working for the government when he made his discoveries?
  - dekhn 11y ago
    In the US, the NIH invests $30B/yr (and other agencies also fund medical research). Note, they're more expansive: much of the research has been into basic biology with no immediate applications (often called pure research, although we were trained to always say the research would eventually leading to curing cancer). England and Japan also do this. Much of the most impactful research has taken decades to play out and the original research didn't necessarily have medical goals, but turned out to be necessary to making progress. Some companies have high enough profit margins to dedicate large budgets to research with no immediate applications. Genentech is the first one that comes to mind, but there are others. It takes a great deal of courage to fund this sort of research when you are a CSO or CEO because of constant calls for immediate profits. I've seen this play out for so long- in biology, in physics, and IT- that I've become inured to the idea that most good ideas take decades to play out until the profits arrive. I am not entirely certain whether it's correct to say Pasteur was working for the government. When a scientist reaches his level of stature, she pays her own ticket.

searine 11y ago

Biology is hard in a way that directly conflicts with silicon valley managerial thinking. There is a reason pharma and biotech companies are slow lumbering giants. It's so they can absorb the impact of R&D failures.

toufka 11y ago
The trouble is that there is some (new) biological science that takes the old massive and powerful tool and applies them to low-hanging fruit that were (until recently), not worth the effort. I've been waiting for some of these moonshot-ish plans to take on these problems, rather than try and compete with the Goliath drug companies. Sadly, since they keep hiring from drug-company stock, they keep getting the same result.
- x0x0 11y ago
  examples?
  - toufka 11y ago
    New fragrances & colors (L'Oreal), new materials (Bolt Threads), new sensors, new foods (Impossible Foods), and further, all the infrastructure required to nurture these kinds of companies. A Google-X-Style project designed to build the boring digital infrastructure that links all of the above companies would be so enabling, if less sexy.
refurb 11y ago
I was going to mention this. Andy Grove wrote a number of papers where he said "if biotech just does what the tech sector does, we'd have hundreds of new drugs". The fact is, it doesn't work that way in biology. When developing new biotech, you'd be lucky if you understood 5% of what a new drug does in the body (sometimes it's 0%!). Serendipity plays a huge part in new drug discovery, although most companies don't like to admit it. Also, I'm not surprised that Google has matured to the point where "moonshots" don't work so well. You see it in biopharma as well. Huge companies, with billions of dollars of R&D spend fail to produce new innovation on a regular basis. It's the small biotech companies that seem to come up with the innovations, often on a much smaller budget. The reasons for that are multiple, but it does come down to a big company worrying about how they will grow their $100 billion company by 10% (finding $10B in business isn't easy) and the fact that with large companies comes structure, process and other things that stifle innovation.

onetimePete 11y ago

Turns out people are hard. You can be a brilliant mind, but that doesn't equate to being a good social engineer. No real, tested science on getting all those complex components together and work productively.

tryitnow 11y ago

After reading this article, it's no wonder. Conrad hasn't been a real technical person in decades. He's a hard-charging business type who learned from a billionaire real estate guy. Nothing wrong with that personality type it's just totally not a fit with Google or frankly with managing any sort of technical people.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

Hmm, first quote is from Rob Enderle, who has in my past experience either being a quote-for-hire who will say whatever the journalist wants them to say, or just totally wrong of his own volition. Either way, as annoying as that "Didn't read past..." thing is, seeing his name was enough for me to close the tab.

mturmon 11y ago
I was dismayed by that too, but there seems to be a lot of first-hand sources as well. It's a long piece and a very short quote from Enderle.

RickS 11y ago

> he exaggerates what Verily can deliver, launches big projects on a whim, and rashly diverts resources from prior commitments to the next hot idea that might bring in revenue. This has led to what they describe as difficult meetings with business partners, and resignations by demoralized engineers and scientists in the face of seemingly impossible demands. Someone has already made the comparison to boston dynamics, but doesn't this also sound just like the recent problems within dropcam/nest? Does anybody have a counterexample of somebody with this personality leading a team to greatness? It feels like a personality type like this is mentioned more often than not when my technical friends leave companies. Somebody has to frame the memo that guys like this (they're always guys) will kill your org.

endtime 11y ago
> they're always guys Marissa Mayer might qualify.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Gini Rometty, Ellen Pao, Meg Whitman, and Carly Fiorina don't exactly have stellar reputations either. I don't think it's a guy thing - I think it's a corporate culture thing. You get failure and disaster whenever you have overpaid and undertalented management. Gender isn't particularly relevant. You especially get failure and disaster when upper management runs a corporation as its own personal cash cow and makes decisions for reasons of self-promotion, self-image, or plain greed, instead of for sound growth-oriented reasons - never mind employee welfare.

vadiml 11y ago

This article cites Rob Enderle. Remembering his performance during SCO/IBM saga I would be very cautious to make conclusions based on his analysis.

iainmerrick 11y ago

What I still don't get is why Google thinks they're good at moonshots, or why they're a good idea in the first place. Google is great at tons of stuff, but all this rhetoric about moonshots seems really empty and baseless.

trhway 11y ago
>why Google thinks they're good at moonshots, or why they're a good idea in the first place. this is the only way to deal with a perpetuum mobile of a money printer they've got in house and the resulting 70B+ cash pile problem, and to avoid it growing into 200B problem that Apple is battling (when did you hear anything new from Apple? - yep, this is how left unchecked small issue grows info a big problem). So, either moonshots (probably a lot of them and god forbid one turns into a money printer too) or pay the dividend like IBM.
- iainmerrick 11y ago
  Or why not cut your margins right down, helping your customers and hurting your competitors, like Amazon?

1_2__3 11y ago

Larry's standard M.O. Hire and empower megalomaniacs because he thinks everything runs too slow and the right way to speed it up is to act like a startup, with one huge personality driving everything. He tried it with Andy/Android, Vic/G+, and Conrad/Verily, among lots of other places. It doesn't work very well, but it looks like it has great 'velocity' so he's happy.

kmonsen 11y ago
Having worked for Andy and Conrad I don't think that comparison is true at all.

Balgair 11y ago

Good Lord, there is so much to unpack in this article. Lets start here: In short, he wants “to defeat Mother Nature,” Conrad told STAT in a brief interview last fall when the Verily name was unveiled. I mean, welcome to every doctor and bio researcher ever. Bio is hard, very hard. Think of it this way, your code is actually alive and trying to kill you back. Doyah' think that might increase the complexity and timelines for debugging a bit, maybe? * And its researchers have published just one scholarly article — about a spoon for people with hand tremors.* I actually saw some of this too. It's a neat idea, The Bodine lab at CU Denver does some cool stuff with this too, using rubber-bands and not electronics that run out of batteries. It's cool stuff, really, but its a 'if all you have is a hammer' myopic outlook for the problem. I concede that the leapfrogging would be great from there. A new car has up to 400 different sensors. You know the oil pressure. You know how much air’s in your tires. But we don’t do that for people,” Conrad says on a promotional video posted on Verily’s website. “Instead of episodic, reactive health care, we should provide preventative and proactive health care,” personalized to the individual. Let's ignore the privacy issues that places like 23andme are dealing with when it comes to this level of detail. The cost alone and the time needed to validate these things are non trivial. If you have, I dunno, black skin or freckles, how much more complex did you just make the problem for an optical sensor? Yes, I can hear you already, you start putting in a case struct in your code, blammo, done. Ok, now for every single sense you add, you have to do this all over. Then you have to train this on the staggering variety of healthy human geometry. The time and more importantly, the power, needed to do this increases factorially (I think) with each new sensor paradigm. Oh, and then you sweat a little bit or go outside. In short, this is really hard. Verily says it has two wristbands in the works: one to read diagnostic nanoparticles that would detect cancer or other ailments at very early stages, another to continuously monitor skin temperature, pulse, and other heart activity. Ok, this is a pop-press article and I will give a pass to the band that is essentially a fit-bit. Journalists are low-paid compared to their hours and utility to society and, as such, can make very big differences seem mundane. However, the cancer screening band sounds too good to be true. As such, it likely is. I admit, I have no idea what this thing is or how well it works, but there is a significant test it needs to pass: is it better than a dog? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection) Ok, look, I make it seem like these guys are fools. They are not, they are all very smart and very hard working people that want to see the world as a better place. However, the SV bubble that includes YC and their ventures into biotech, is just foolish here. \ Bio is Hard, full stop. Bio wastes colossal amounts of cash in failed ventures, more so than in tech, though I have no data to back this up. Bio is not something that you 'hack', it hacks you (see any disease or disability). I get it, VCs see the profit margins on Viagra and their mouths get wet. Here is what you need to know though, in biotech the road to success is very very difficult, but once you get 'there' you essentially have a monopoly due to that barrier to entry. But don't confuse that monopoly with the the reality that many grad students and VCs imploded in failed ventures too. Mad respect to those folks working under this guy, but SV needs to understand that debugging yourself is neigh impossible.

amelius 11y ago

Offtopic: given that the life sciences are the promised new hi-tech boom, I'm wondering why there are so few posts about it on HN (?)

dekhn 11y ago
Life science was the promised boom 25 years ago when I started undergrad as a mol bio major. Very little progress. I check back in every decade or so and things proceed slowly.

amelius 11y ago

Medicine and an advertising agency, I'm not sure if they are such a great combination anyway.

dredmorbius 11y ago
A distressingly large function of many pharmaceutical companies is "drugs marketing". There may be more synergy than you think.