3 ms·

I will second this as I am currently working in the biotech field. The amount of short sighted thinking and opportunism from small start ups to the most massive

I will second this as I am currently working in the biotech field. The amount of short sighted thinking and opportunism from small start ups to the most massive CMO's in the world is staggering. My take is that the whole field is extremely underfunded and that breeds levels of competition and short term profit seeking, but that's probably a biased opinion. I'm sure if the field had the level of VC support that traditional software/computing gets we would be making huge strides with our humanity.

DennisAleynikov 6y ago
that's tragic. it seems the funnels of money that exist can't get anywhere meaningful without aggressive fundraising and being first to some buzzword
dekhn 6y ago
I don't know if the field is underfunded. What I'd say is that the area is very risky (few ideas really pan out), there are lots of powerful incumbents who want to retain the many-billion-$ revenue streams, and it's very costly to test. But I also see people wasting huge amount of money chasing ideas that really would be better handled with shotgunning (the tech VCs I used work with said "why would I want to invest $20M in a biotech that fails after 20 years, when i can invest $1M in 20 tech startups and one of them will make $1B in 2-3 years?"). It's not clear to me that investing more money helps, either. For example, the NIH doubled its budget during the Clinton era, leading to far higher numbers of grad students being trained than there were positions (prof, etc) in their fields. So there was a glut, super-high competition for a limited number of spaces, and many people dropped out of the race to be a prof and instead went to be ML/data science people at ads firms.